ately ventured to set
up a small business in this unpromising village, and his sign had now
been hanging out a week. Not a customer yet; he was a discouraged man,
and sorry he had come. But his weather changed suddenly now. First one
and then another chief citizen's wife said to him privately:

"Come to my house Monday week--but say nothing about it for the present.
We think of building."

He got eleven invitations that day. That night he wrote his daughter and
broke off her match with her student. He said she could marry a mile
higher than that.

Pinkerton the banker and two or three other well-to-do men planned
country-seats--but waited. That kind don't count their chickens until
they are hatched.

The Wilsons devised a grand new thing--a fancy-dress ball. They made no
actual promises, but told all their acquaintanceship in confidence that
they were thinking the matter over and thought they should give it--"and
if we do, you will be invited, of course." People were surprised, and
said, one to another, "Why, they are crazy, those poor Wilsons, they
can't afford it." Several among the nineteen said privately to their
husbands, "It is a good idea, we will keep still till their cheap thing
is over, then _we_ will give one that will make it sick."

The days drifted along, and the bill of future squanderings rose higher
and higher, wilder and wilder, more and more foolish and reckless. It
began to look as if every member of the nineteen would not only spend his
whole forty thousand dollars before receiving-day, but be actually in
debt by the time he got the money. In some cases light-headed people did
not stop with planning to spend, they really spent--on credit. They
bought land, mortgages, farms, speculative stocks, fine clothes, horses,
and various other things, paid down the bonus, and made themselves liable
for the rest--at ten days. Presently the sober second thought came, and
Halliday noticed that a ghastly anxiety was beginning to show up in a
good many faces. Again he was puzzled, and didn't know what to make of
it. "The Wilcox kittens aren't dead, for they weren't born; nobody's
broken a leg; there's no shrinkage in mother-in-laws; _nothing_ has
happened--it is an insolvable mystery."

There was another puzzled man, too--the Rev. Mr. Burgess. For days,
wherever he went, people seemed to follow him or to be watching out for
him; and if he ever found himself in a retired spot, a member of the