Wakefield
hear of it long. For the emery dust soon ceased to glisten in the air
and the steel died of a distemper.

It was a very real shock to Wakefield, and many a boy that had been
meant for college went into his father's store instead, and many a girl
who had planned to go East to be polished stayed at home and polished
her mother's plates and pans, because the family funds had been invested
in the steel-engravings of the cutlery stock certificates. They were
very handsome engravings.

Hope languished in Wakefield until a company from Kenosha consented to
transport its entire industry thither if it could receive a building
rent free. It was proffered, and it accepted, the cutlery works. For a
season the neighboring streets were acrid with the aroma of the
passionate pickles that were bottled there. And then its briny deeps
ceased to swim with knobby condiments. A tin-foil company abode awhile,
and yet again a tamale-canning corporation, which in its turn sailed on
to the Sargasso Sea of missing industries.

Other factory buildings in Wakefield fared likewise. They were but
lodging-houses for transient failures. The population swung with the
tide, but always at anchor. The lift which the census received from an
artificial-flower company, employing seventy-five hands, was canceled by
the demise of a more redolent pork-packing concern of equal pay-roll.
People missed it when the wind blew from the west.

But Wakefield hoped on. One day the executive committee of the
Wide-a-Wakefield Club, having nothing else to do, met in executive
session. There were various propositions to consider. All of them were
written on letter-heads of the highest school of commercial art, and all
of them promised to endow Wakefield with some epoch-making advantage,
provided merely that Wakefield furnish a building rent free, tax free,
water free, and subscribe to a certain amount of stock.

The club regarded these glittering baits with that cold and clammy gaze
with which an aged trout of many-scarred gills peruses some newfangled
spoon.

But if these letters were tabled with suspicion because they offered too
much for too little, what hospitality could be expected for a letter
which offered still more for still less? The chairman of the committee
was Ansel K. Pettibone, whose sign-board announced him as a "practical
house-painter and paper-hanger." He read this letter, head-lines and
all:

MARK A. SHELBY JOHN R. SHELBY LUKE