Sights? No. Unless it be the sight of a town that seems to exist in a state of unending reverie. This is fancy. New Damascus appears to be haunted with memories of things confusedly forgotten, as if each night it dreamed the same dream and never had quite remembered it.
In the Woolwine library there is a memory of distinction in sixty parts,—bound volumes of the New Damascus Intelligencer back to 1820. There was a newspaper! An original poem, a column humorous, a notable speech on the slavery question, the secret of Henry Clay’s ruggedness discovered in the fact that he bathed his whole person once a day in cold water, and the regular advertisers, all on the first page. One of the advertisers was a Wm. Wardle, bookseller, stationer, importer of all the current English imprints, proprietor of a very large stock of the world’s best literature, periodicals, and so forth. Wm. Wardle’s name is still on the lintel of the three-story building he occupied until about 1870. The ground floor now is rented to a tobacconist who keeps billiard tables in the back for the iron workers, the upper floors are in disuse, and there is no bookshop in New Damascus. Well, that is a sight, perhaps, only nobody would think to show it to you, because much stranger than the disappearance of that important old bookshop is the fact that no one can remember ever to have missed it.
If you mention this curious fact to the First National Bank president he helps you look at the faded name of Wardle above the tobacconist’s sign and says, “Well!” precisely as he would help you to look at one of the great green holes where a blast furnace was and say, “Well, well!” never having seen it before.
“What do people now read in New Damascus?”
“Magazines,” says the banker. “I find if I read the Sunday newspapers I get everything I want.”
“How do you account for the fact that New Damascus, an iron town, has fewer people to-day than it had fifty years ago?”
“You’ve touched the answer,” says the banker. “It is an iron town. Always was. When modern steel making came in fifty or sixty years ago anybody might have known that steel would displace iron. New Damascus stuck to iron.”
“Lack of enterprise, you mean?”
“Something like that.”
“Yet New Damascus had the enterprise to roll the first rails that were made in this country.”