illionaires
go under like the passengers of a wrecked steamer.

"BUNK CITY."

Did you ever pass the remains of a "boom" town in your travels? Did you
never gaze upon the remains of "Bunk City," where but yesterday all was
life and bustle, and to-day it looks like the ruins of Babylon? The
empty fields for miles and miles around are laid off and dug up in
streets, and look like they had been struck with ten thousand streaks
of chain lightning. Standing here and there are huge frames holding up
mammoth sign boards, bearing the names of land companies, but the land
companies are gone. Half driven nails are left to rust in a few old
skeleton buildings, the brick lies unmortared in half finished walls,
and tenantless houses stand here and there like the ghosts of buried
hope. Down by the river stands the furnace, grim and silent as the
extinct crater of Popocatepetl; and the great hotel on the hill looks
like the tower of Babel two thousand years after the confusion of
tongues. The last of the speculators, with his blue nose and his old
battered plug hat which resembles an accordion that has been yanked by
a cyclone, stands on the corner and contemplates his old sedge fields
which have shrunk in value from one hundred dollars a front foot, to one
_dollar for a hundred front acres_, and balefully sings a new song:

"After the boom is over, after the panic's on,
After the fools are leavin', after the money's gone,
Many a bank is "busted," if we could see in the room,
Many a pocket is empty, after the boom."

"YOUR UNCLE."

[Illustration: COMING.]

An impecunious speculator once flooded a town with handbills and posters
containing this announcement: "Your Uncle is coming." The streams of
passers-by looked at the bill boards and wondered what it meant. The
speculator rented the theatre, and one day a new flood of handbills and
posters made this announcement: "Your Uncle is here." He gave orders
to his stage manager to raise the curtain exactly at eight o'clock.
The speculator himself stood in the door and received the admission fees
and then disappeared. In their curiosity to see the performance of "Your
Uncle," the villagers filled every seat in the theatre long before the
hour for the performance arrived. The curtain rose at the appointed
hour, and lo! on a board, in the center of the stage, was a card bearing
this announcement in large letters: "_Your Uncle is gone._"

What a splendid illus