FROM CULTURE CLUBS TO SOCIAL SERVICE Unless you have lived in a live town in the Middle West--say in Michigan, or Indiana, or Nebraska--you cannot have a very adequate idea of how ugly, and dirty, and neglected, and disreputable a town can be when nobody loves it.

The railway station is a long, low, rakish thing of boards, painted a muddy maroon color.

Around it is a stretch of bare ground strewn with ashes.

Beyond lies the main street, with some good business blocks,--a First National Bank in imposing granite, and a Masonic Temple in pressed brick.

The high school occupies a treeless, grassless, windswept block by itself.
In the center of the residential section of the town is a big, unsightly, hummocky vacant place, vaguely known as the park--or the place where they are going to have a park, when the city gets around to it.