In Our Town

by William Allen White

The Coming of the Leisure Class

We all are workers in our town, as people are in every small town. It is always proper to ask what a man does for a living with us, for none of us has money enough to live without work, and until the advent of Beverly Amidon, our leisure class consisted of Red Martin, the gambler, the only man in town with nothing to do in the middle of the day; and the black boys who loafed on the south side of the bank building through the long afternoons until it was time to deliver the clothes which their wives and mothers had washed. Everyone else in town works, and, excepting an occasional picnic, there is no social activity among the men until after sundown. But five years ago Beverly Amidon came to town, and brought with him a large leisure and a taste for society which made him easily the "glass of fashion and the mould of form" not only in our little community, but all over this part of the State. Beverly and his mother, who had come to make their home with her sister, in one of the big houses on the hill, had money. How much, we had no idea. In a small town when one has "money" no one knows just how much or how little, but it must be over fifteen thousand dollars, otherwise one is merely "well fixed."

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