, be called for an old
settler, Gager's Station; and if you would like to see some beautiful
scenery, take a canoe and float down the Pomme de Terre River. You will
have to make some portages, and you will have a good appetite for
supper when you reach the old Lindsley house, ten miles from Gager's,
but its present owner is hospitable.

A queer old chap was Lindsley the last time I saw him. I remember how
he took me all over his claim and showed me the beauties of
Lindsleyville, as he called it. His long iron-gray hair fluttered in
the wind, and his face seemed like a wizard's, penetrating but
unearthly. That was long before the great tide of immigrants had begun
to find their way into this paradise through the highway of the Sauk
Valley. Lindsleyville was a hundred and fifty miles out of the world at
that time. Its population numbered two--Lindsley and his daughter. The
old man had tried to make a fortune in many ways. There was no sort of
useless invention that he had not attempted, and you will find in the
Patent Office models without number of beehives and cannons, steam
cut-offs and baby jumpers, lightning churns and flying machines on
which he had taken out patents, assured of making a fortune from each
one. He had raised fancy chickens, figured himself rich on two swarms
of bees, traveled with a magic lantern, written a philosophic novel,
and started a newspaper. There was but one purpose in which he was
fixed--which was, to guard his daughter jealously. To do this, and to
make the experiment of building a Utopian city, he had traveled to the
summit of this knoll on the right bank of the Pomme de Terre. There
never was a more beautiful landscape than that which Lindsleyville
commanded. But the town did not grow, chiefly because it was so far
beyond the border, though the conditions in his deeds intended to
secure the character of the city from deterioration were so many that
nobody would have been willing to buy the lots.

At the time I speak of David Lindsley had dwelt on the Pomme de Terre
for five years. He had removed suddenly from the Connecticut village in
which he had been living because he discovered that his daughter had,
in spite of his watchfulness, formed an attachment for a young man who
had the effrontery to disclose the whole thing to him by politely
asking his consent to their marriage.

"Marry my daughter!" choked the old man. "Why, Mr. Brown, you are
crazy! I have educated her upon the combin