y was satisfied except
the trouble makers, who were ignored. In short, the episode of the
Riverside Franchise is a triumphant proof of the contention that
business men are the best fitted to conduct the politics of their
country.

We had learned to pursue our happiness in packs, we knew that the
Happy Hunting-Grounds are here and now, while the Reverend Carey Heddon
continued to assure the maimed, the halt and the blind that their
kingdom was not of this world, that their time was coming later. Could
there have been a more idyl arrangement! Everybody should have been
satisfied, but everybody was not. Otherwise these pages would never have
been written.

BOOK 3.

XVIII.

As the name of our city grew to be more and more a byword for sudden and
fabulous wealth, not only were the Huns and the Slavs, the Czechs and
the Greeks drawn to us, but it became the fashion for distinguished
Englishmen and Frenchmen and sometimes Germans and Italians to pay us a
visit when they made the grand tour of America. They had been told that
they must not miss us; scarcely a week went by in our community--so it
was said--in which a full-fledged millionaire was not turned out. Our
visitors did not always remain a week,--since their rapid journeyings
from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to the Gulf rarely
occupied more than four,--but in the books embodying their mature
comments on the manners, customs and crudities of American civilization
no less than a chapter was usually devoted to us; and most of the
adjectives in their various languages were exhausted in the attempt
to prove how symptomatic we were of the ambitions and ideals of
the Republic. The fact that many of these gentlemen--literary and
otherwise--returned to their own shores better fed and with larger
balances in the banks than when they departed is neither here nor there.
Egyptians are proverbially created to be spoiled.

The wiser and more fortunate of these travellers and students of life
brought letters to Mr. and Mrs. Hambleton Durrett. That household was
symptomatic--if they liked--of the new order of things; and it was rare
indeed when both members of it were at home to entertain them. If Mr.
Durrett were in the city, and they did not happen to be Britons with
sporting proclivities, they simply were not entertained: when Mrs.
Durrett received them dinners were given in their honour on the Durrett
gold plate, and they spent cosey and delightful hou