Back Home by Irvin S. Cobb

OVER night, it almost seems, a town will undergo radical and startling changes. The transition covers a period of years really, but to those who have lived in the midst of it, the realization comes sometimes with the abruptness of a physical shock; while the returning prodigal finds himself lost amongst surroundings which by rights should wear shapes as familiar as the back of his own hand. It is as though an elderly person of settled habits and a confirmed manner of life had suddenly fared forth in new and amazing apparel -- as though he had swapped his crutch for a niblick and his clay pipe for a gold tipped cigarette.

It was so with our town. From the snoreful profundities of a Rip Van Winkle sleep it woke up one morning to find itself made over; whether for better or worse I will not presume to say, but nevertheless, made over. Before this the natural boundaries to the north had been a gravel bluff which chopped off sharply above a shallow flat sloping away to the willows and the river beyond. Now this saucer-expanse was dotted over with mounds of made ground rising like pimples in a sunken cheek; and spreading like a red brick rash across the face of it, was a tin roofed, flat-topped irritation of structures -- a cotton mill, a brewery, and a small packing plant dominating a clutter of lesser industries. Above these on the edge of the hollow, the old warehouse still stood, but the warehouse had lost its character while keeping its outward shape. Fifty years it resounded to a skirmish fire clamor of many hammers as the negro hands knocked the hoops off the hogsheads and the auctioneer bellowed for his bids; where now, brisk young women, standing in rows, pasted labels and drove corks into bottles of Dr. Bozeman's Infallible Cough Cure. Nothing remained to tell the past glories of the old days, except that, in wet weather, a faint smell of tobacco would steam out of the cracks in the floor; and on the rotted rafters over head, lettered in the sprawling chirography of some dead and gone shipping clerk, were the names and the dates and the times of record-breaking steamboat runs -- _Idlewild_, Louisville to Memphis, so many hours and so many minutes; _Pat Cleburne_, Nashville to Paducah, so many hours and so many minutes.