day before the great land sale:

"Capital stock paid in--thirteen thousand dollars;

"Deposits--three hundred thousand;

"Loans--two hundred and sixty thousand--interest from eight to twelve
per cent." And, beardless though those directors were, that statement
made them reel.

A club was formed and the like of it was not below Mason and Dixon's
line in the way of furniture, periodicals, liquors and cigars. Poker
ceased--it was too tame in competition with this new game of town-lots.
On the top of High Knob a kingdom was bought. The young bloods of the
town would build a lake up there, run a road up and build a Swiss chalet
on the very top for a country club. The "booming" editor was discharged.
A new paper was started, and the ex-editor of a New York Daily was got
to run it. If anybody wanted anything, he got it from no matter where,
nor at what cost. Nor were the arts wholly neglected. One man, who was
proud of his voice, thought he would like to take singing lessons. An
emissary was sent to Boston to bring back the best teacher he could
find. The teacher came with a method of placing the voice by trying to
say "Come!" at the base of the nose and between the eyes. This was with
the lips closed. He charged two dollars per half hour for this effort,
he had each pupil try it twice for half an hour each day, and for six
weeks the town was humming like a beehive. At the end of that period,
the teacher fell ill and went his way with a fat pocket-book and not
a warbling soul had got the chance to open his mouth. The experience
dampened nobody. Generosity was limitless. It was equally easy to raise
money for a roulette wheel, a cathedral or an expedition to Africa.
And even yet the railroad was miles away and even yet in February, the
Improvement Company had a great land sale. The day before it, competing
purchasers had deposited cheques aggregating three times the sum
asked for by the company for the land. So the buyers spent the night
organizing a pool to keep down competition and drawing lots for the
privilege of bidding. For fairness, the sale was an auction, and one old
farmer who had sold some of the land originally for a hundred dollars an
acre, bought back some of that land at a thousand dollars a lot.

That sale was the climax and, that early, Hale got a warning word from
England, but he paid no heed even though, after the sale, the boom
slackened, poised and stayed still; for optimism was unquenchable and
anothe