the
other. In each there was a loud call for fresh shad and stewed oysters,
or a comparatively feeble call for fresh shad and stewed oysters, under
the same biennial conditions.

Such was the oscillation of grandeur and power between the two cities.
It was an old-time arrangement, and like many other old-fashioned
things, as for instance wood fires in open fireplaces, it had not only
its substantial merits but its superficial inconveniences. Every year
certain ancient officials were obliged to pack up hundreds of public
documents and expedite them from Fastburg to Slowburg, or from Slowburg
back to Fastburg. Every year there was an expense of a few dollars on
this account, which the State treasurer figured up with agonies of
terror, and which the opposition roared at as if the administration
could have helped it. The State-Houses were two mere deformities of
patched plaster and leprous whitewash; they were such shapeless,
graceless, dilapidated wigwams, that no sensitive patriot could look at
them without wanting to fly to the uttermost parts of the earth; and
yet it was not possible to build new ones, and hardly possible to
obtain appropriations enough to shingle out the weather; for Fastburg
would vote no money to adorn Slowburg, and Slowburg was equally
niggardly toward Fastburg. The same jealousy produced the same
frugality in the management of other public institutions, so that the
patients of the lunatic asylum were not much better lodged and fed than
the average sane citizen, and the gallows-birds in the State's prison
were brought down to a temperance which caused admirers of that species
of fowl to tremble with indignation. In short, the two capitals were as
much at odds as the two poles of a magnet, and the results of this
repulsion were not all of them worthy of hysterical admiration.

But advantages seesawed with disadvantages. In this double-ender of a
State political jobbery was at fault, because it had no headquarters.
It could not get together a ring; it could not raise a corps of
lobbyists. Such few axe-grinders as there were had to dodge back and
forth between the Fastburg grindstone and the Slowburg grindstone,
without ever fairly getting their tools sharpened. Legislature here and
legislature there; it was like guessing at a pea between two thimbles;
you could hardly ever put your finger on the right one. Then what one
capital favored the other disfavored; and between them appropriations
were kicke