Joseph Conrad attended school in Cracow in the 1870s, and returned for a visit in 1914. He and his son took a walk around the Main Square.
"We are now on the line A.B.," I said to my companion, importantly.
It was the name bestowed in my time on one of the sides of the Square by the senior students of that town of classical learning and historical relics. The common citizens knew nothing of it, and even if they had, would not have dreamed of taking it seriously. He who used it was of the initiated, belonged to the schools. We youngsters regarded that name as a fine jest, the invention of a most excellent fancy. Even as I uttered it to my boy I experienced again that sense of my privileged initiation. And then, happening to look up at the wall, I saw in the light of the corner lamp, a white, cast-iron tablet fixed thereon, bearing the inscription in raised black letters, thus: "Line A. B." Heavens! The name had been adopted officially! Any town urchin, any gutter-snipe, any herb-selling woman of the market-place, any wandering Boeotian, was free to talk of the line A. B. It had become a mere name in a directory. I was stunned by the extreme mutability of things. Time could work wonders, and no mistake. A Municipality had stolen an invention of excellent fancy, and a fine jest had turned into a horrid piece of cast-iron. (From "Poland Revisited".)
He hadn't counted on his classmates growing up to be city fathers.
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