Little presents, smiles, and kind words meant so much to the overworked, hopeless women, and her cheery manner was so pleasant to men and children, that all worshipped her--clumsily and mutely, but whole-heartedly.

She was a fairy lady to them.
The truth was that, in her eagerness to secure the most vivid kind of local color, she had gone a step too far.

Clarence, with its decayed sidewalks and rotting buildings, was not typical of middle Iowa any more than a stagnant pool lift by a receded river after a flood is typical of the river itself.

Before the days of railroads Clarence had been a lively little town, but it was on the top of a hill, and, when the engineer of the Jefferson Western Railroad had laid his ruler on the map and had drawn a straight line across Iowa to represent the course of the road, Clarence had been left ten or twelve miles to one side, and, as the town was not important enough to justify spoiling the beauty of the straight line by putting a curve in it, a station was marked on the road at the point nearest Clarence, and called Kilo.

For a while the new station was merely a sidetrack on the level prairie, a convenience for the men of Clarence, but before Clarence knew how it had happened Kilo was a flourishing town, and the older town on the hill had begun to decay.