re won't be a suit
of evening clothes worn. The dress suit may come in here with street
cars and passenger elevators, but it lacks a good deal of being here
yet, except in the most sporadic and infrequent way. And this thing is
to be so absolutely informal that it would make the natives stare. You
wouldn't wear it if you had it, Al."

"Who will come?" said Mrs. Barslow.

"Oh, a couple of dozen ladies and gentlemen, business men and doctors
and lawyers and their women-folks. They'll stray in from eight to ten
and find something to eat on the sideboard. They'll have the happiness
of meeting you, and you can see what the people you are thinking of
living among and doing business with are like. It's a necessary part of
your visit; and you can't get out of it now, for I've taken the liberty
of making all the arrangements. And, as a matter of fact, you don't
want to do so, do you, now?"

Thus appealed to, Alice consented. Nothing was said to me about it, my
willingness being presumed.

The guests that evening were almost exclusively men whom I had met
during the day, and members of their families. In the absence of any
more engaging topic, we discussed Lattimore as our possible future home.

"I have always felt," said Mr. Hinckley, who was one of the guests,
"that this is the natural site of a great city. These valleys, centering
here like the spokes of a wheel, are ready-made railway-routes. In the
East there is a city of from fifty thousand to three times that, every
hundred miles or so. Why shouldn't it be so here?"

"Suh," said Captain Tolliver, "the thing is inevitable. Somewhah in this
region will grow up a metropolis. Shall it be hyah, o' at Fairchild, o'
Angus Falls? If the people of Lattimore sit supinely, suh, and let these
country villages steal from huh the queenship which God o'dained fo' huh
when He placed huh in this commandin' site, then, suh, they ah too base
to be wo'thy of the suhvices of gentlemen."

"I've always been taught," said Mrs. Trescott, "that the credit of
placing her in this site belonged to either Mr. Hinckley or General
Lattimore."

"Really," said Miss Addison to me, "I don't see how they can laugh at
such irreverence!"

"I think," said Miss Hinckley in my other ear, "that Mr. Elkins
expressed the whole truth in the matter of the rivalry of these three
towns, when he said that when two ride on a horse, one must ride behind.
Aren't his quotations so--so--illuminating?"

I looked ab