sweeping westward in the
middle of the last century, it passed its tenth thousand with a rush;
then something happened.

For decades the decennial census dismally tolled the same knell of
fifteen thousand in round numbers. The annual censuses but echoed the
reverberations. A few more cases of measles one year, and the population
lapsed a little below the mark; an easy winter, and it slipped a little
above. No mandragora of bad times or bad health ever quite brought it so
low as fourteen thousand. No fever of prosperity ever sent the
temperature quite so high as sixteen thousand.

The iteration got on people's nerves till a commercial association was
formed under the name of the Wide-a-Wakefield Club, with a motto of
"Boom or Bust." Many individuals accomplished the latter, but the town
still failed of the former. The chief activity of the club was in the
line of decoying manufacturers over into Macedonia by various bribes.

Its first capture was a cutlery company in another city. Though
apparently prosperous, it had fallen foul of the times, and its
president adroitly allowed the Wide-a-Wakefield Club to learn that, if a
building of sufficient size were offered rent free for a term of years,
the cutlery company might be induced to move to Wakefield and conduct
its business there, employing at least a hundred laborers, year in, year
out.

There was not in all Wakefield a citizen too dull to see the individual
and collective advantage of this hundred increase. It meant money
in the pocket of every doctor, lawyer, merchant, clothier,
boarding-house-keeper, saloon-keeper, soda-water-vender--whom not?

Every establishment in town would profit, from the sanatorium to the
"pantatorium"--as the institution for the replenishment of trousers was
elegantly styled.

Commercial fervor rose to such heights in Wakefield that in no time at
all enough money was subscribed to build a convenient factory and to
purchase as many of the shares of cutlery stock as the amiable president
cared to print. In due season the manufacture of tableware and penknives
began, and the pride of the town was set aglow by the trade-mark
stamped on every article issued from the cutlery factory. It was an
ingenious emblem--a glorious Cupid in a sash marked "Wakefield,"
stabbing a miserable Cupid in a sash marked "Sheffield."

It was Sheffield that survived. In fact, the stupid English city
probably never heard of the Wakefield Cutlery Company. Nor did