sic municipality whose sonorous name will be the
admiration of all true Americans and the despair of the spelling classes
in our schools. Lithopolis! It has the cadence of Alexander, and
Alcibiades, and Numa Pompilius, and Belisarius--it reeks of greatness!
Monterey Centre--ever been there? Ever seen that poverty-stricken,
semi-hamlet, squatting on the open prairie, and inhabited by a parcel of
dreaming Nimshies?"

"No," said I; "have you?"

"No," he replied. "What difference does it make? He that goeth up
against Lithopolis and them that dwell therein, the same is a
dreaming Nimshi."

The beginnings of faction were in our town-sites; for most of them were
in no sense towns, or even villages. There was a future county-seat
fight in the rivalry between Monterey Centre and Lithopolis--and not
only these, but in the rival rivalries of Cole's Grove, Imperial City,
Rocksylvania, New Baltimore, Cathedral Rock, Waynesville and I know not
how many more projects, all ambitiously laid out in the
still-unorganized county of Monterey, and all but one or two now quite
lost to all human memory or thought, except as some diligent abstractor
of titles or real-estate lawyer discovers something of them in the chain
of title of a farm; the spires and gables of the 'fifties realized only
in the towering silo, the spinning windmill, or the vine-clad porch of a
substantial farm-house. But in the heyday of their new-driven corner
stakes, what wars were waged for the power to draw people into them; and
especially, how the county-seat fights raged like prairie fires set out
by those Nimrods who sought to make up in the founding of cities for
what they lacked as hunters, in comparison with the establisher of Babel
and Erech and Accad and Calneh in the land of Shinar.

Between the Maquoketa and Independence I lost N.V. Creede, merely
because I traded for some more lame cows and a young Alderney bull, and
had to stop to break them. He stayed with me two days, and then caught a
ride with one of Judge Horace Stone's teams which was making a quick
trip to Lithopolis.

"Good-by, Mr. Vandemark," said he at parting, "and good luck. I am sorry
not to be able to remunerate you for your hospitality, which I shall
always remember for its improving conversation, its pancakes, its pork
and beans, and its milk and butter, rather than for its breathless
speed. And take the advice of your man of the law in parting: in your
voyages over the inland waterways