e pseudonym of the Arcadia Development Company,
also laid out streets and laid in a network of pipe-lines, and staked
out lots until the sawmill protested for lack of tie-lumber. It put down
miles of cement walks, fringed them with cottonwood saplings, telephone
poles and electric lights. It built a hotel and a few streets of
party-colored cottages--directoire, with lingerie tile roofs, organdy
facades and peplum, intersecting panels and outside chimneys at the
gable ends. It decreed a park, with nooks, lanes, mazes, lake,
swans, ballground, grandstand, bandstand and the band appertaining
thereunto--all of which apparently came into being over night. Then it
employed a competent staff of word-artists and capitalized the climate.

The result was astonishing. The cottonwoods grew apace and a swift town
grew with them--swift in every sense of the word. It took good money to
buy good lots in Arcadia. People with money must be fed, served and
amused by people wanting money. In three years the trees cast a pleasant
shade and the company cast a balance, with gratifying results. They
discounted the unearned increment for a generation to come.

It was a beneficent scheme, selling ozone and novelty, sunshine and
delight. The buyers got far more than the worth of their money, the
company got their money--and every one was happy. Health and good
spirits are a bargain at any price. There were sandstorms and hot days;
but sand promotes digestion and digestion promotes cheerfulness. Heat
merely enhanced the luxury of shaded hammocks. As an adventurer thawed
out, he sent for seven others worse than himself. Arcadia became the
metropolis of the county and, by special election, the county-seat.
Courthouse, college and jail followed in quick succession.

For the company, Arcadia life was one grand, sweet song, with, thus
far, but a single discord. As has been said, Arcadia was laid out on the
plain. There was higher ground on three sides--Rainbow Mountain to the
east, the deltas of La Luz Creek and the Alamo to the north and south.
New Mexico was dry, as a rule. After the second exception, when
enthusiastic citizens went about on stilts to forward a project for
changing the town's name to Venice, the company acknowledged its error
handsomely. When dry land prevailed once more above the face of the
waters, it built a mighty moat by way of the _amende honorable_--a moat
with its one embankment on the inner side of the five-mile horseshoe