The Dim Lantern

Sherwood Park is twelve miles from Washington. Starting as a somewhat pretentious suburb on the main line of a railroad, it was blessed with easy accessibility until encroaching trolleys swept the tide of settlement away from it, and left it high and dry—its train service, unable to compete with modern motor vehicles, increasingly inefficient.Property values, inevitably, decreased. The little suburb degenerated, grew less fashionable. People who might have added social luster to its gatherings moved away. The frame houses, which at first had made such a brave showing, became a bit down at the heel. Most of them, built before the revival of good taste in architecture, seemed top-heavy and dull with their imitation towers, their fretted balconies, their gray and brown coloring, their bands of contrasting shingles tied like sashes around their middles.