Show the deserted ohio village gone the words came with a deep groan from the lips of the desolate man who stood on the lonely street and looked about him the beams of the setting sun shone with a yellow glow on the peaceful village nestling in a lovely plain the modest spires in the churches glittered in atmosphere free from smoke and a sound came to the ear of the solitary man who brain was throbbing and whose heart was bursting with a sense of his strange and unearthly isolation under a sky of unsurpassed beauty he exclaimed in a land where even winter in its most savage mood breathes mildly in the favored garden spot of a great agrest state amid fertile valleys and vine clad hillsides hill sides whose vegetation is already leaping into life in response to the creative energy of the vernal sunshine can it be possible that I 1 have lived to see such a scene as this he paused a moment to kick a wandering an dering and lonesome looking du dog that was sniffing about him in ab abjectly inquisitive and apologetic manner iner and again his voice rang plaintively out amid the weird solitude where are they all where are my friends my neighbors the companions ot of my youth what mysterious calamity has swept over this once happy place as with the besom of you here again you miserable hound get out he drew his hand tremblingly across his pallid brow and once more his voice smote the a air they are not herel here T they aey are gone great snakes of course gonel where are ye friends of my childhood 0 familiar faces that filled the horizon of h hope in my years and framed frame the radiant vision that my ambition bodied forth where the dickens and tom walker do you hang out now with these words he took a fresh chew of toba tobacco ceo pulled his hat down over his eyes gave one farewell glance up and down the deserted and voiceless street turned his back on the home of his childhood and departed forever he was the only human being in that beautiful southern ohio town that had not gone to washington with a petition for an office chicago tribune |