Silas Bradford's Boy by Joseph C. Lincoln

Late on a late autumn afternoon in the year 1903 the Village of Denboro, in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, was undergoing inspection and appraisal. It did not know that it was undergoing anything of the kind, nor would it have been in the least troubled if it had known.

Denboro was satisfied with itself. "Not a city--no! Not a crowded metropolis, teeming with riches and poverty, its gilded palaces rubbing elbows with its sin-soaked slums--not that indeed. But a community of homes, the homes of God-fearing men and noble women, a town with churches and schools, of prosperous shops and a well- patronized circulating library, whose sons have sailed the seven seas, whose daughters have reared their children to be true Americans--in short, my friends, perhaps as fine an example of what a town should be as may be found between the surging billows of the Atlantic upon the one hand and the blue bosom of the Pacific upon the other." (See the address of the Hon. Alonzo Pearson, delivered at the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the incorporation of the township of Denboro, and on file in the office of Abel Snow, town clerk.)