id, there was more land then laid out in town-sites in Kansas than in
all the cities and towns of the settled parts of the country. In Iowa
there were town-sites along all the streams and scattered all over the
prairies. Everybody was in debt, in the business world, and when land
stopped growing in value, sales stopped, and then the day of reckoning
came. All financial panics come from land speculation. Show me a way to
keep land from advancing in value, and I will tell you how to prevent
financial panics[14].

[14] The author, when his attention is called to the Mississippi Bubble,
insists that it was nothing more nor less than betting on the land
development of a great new region. As to the "Tulipomania" which once
created a small panic in Holland, he insists that such a fool notion can
not often occur, and never can have wide-spread results like a genuine
financial panic. In which the editor is inclined to believe the best
economists will agree with, him.--G.v.d.M.

But, though we knew nothing about this general wreck and ruin back east,
we knew that we were miserably poor. In the winter of 1857-8 Magnus and
I were beggarly ragged and so short of fuel and bedding that he came
over and stayed with me, so that we could get along with one bed and one
fire. My buffalo robes were the things that kept us warm, those howling
nights, or when it was so still that we could hear the ice crack in the
creek eighty rods off. My wife has always said that Magnus and I holed
up in our den like wild animals, and sometimes like a certain domestic
one. But what with Magnus and the fiddle and his stories of Norway and
mine of the canal we amused ourselves pretty well and got along without
baths. My cows, and the chickens, and our vegetables and potatoes, and
our white and buckwheat flour and the corn-meal mush and johnny-cake
kept us fat, and I entirely outgrew my best suit, so that I put it on
for every day, and burst it at most of the seams in a week.

2

I was sorry for the people in the towns, and sold most of my eggs,
fowls, butter, cream and milk on credit: and though Virginia and I were
not on good terms and I never went to see her any more; and though
Grandma Thorndyke was, I felt sure, trying to get Virginia's mind fixed
on a better match, like Bob Wade or Paul Holbrook, I used to take eggs,
butter, milk or flour to the elder's family almost every time I went to
town: and when the weather was warm enough so that they woul