h Sindbad and his bale of riches were swept
out of the Cave of Death to the sunlight of life and fortune, so surely
and so simply had it transported him beyond the cramped and darkened
limits of his present life. He was in the better world of boyish
romance,--of gallant deeds and high emprises; of miraculous atonement
and devoted sacrifice; of brave men, and those rarer, impossible
women,--the immaculate conception of a boy's virgin heart. What mattered
it that behind that glittering window his mother and sisters grew
feverish and excited over the vulgar details of their real but baser
fortune? From the dark tool-shed by the muddy current, John Milton,
with a battered dogs'-eared chronicle, soared on the wings of fancy far
beyond their wildest ken!

CHAPER V.

Prosperity had settled upon the plains of Tasajara. Not only had the
embarcadero emerged from the tules of Tasajara Creek as a thriving town
of steamboat wharves, warehouses, and outlying mills and factories, but
in five years the transforming railroad had penetrated the great plain
itself and revealed its undeveloped fertility. The low-lying lands that
had been yearly overflowed by the creek, now drained and cultivated,
yielded treasures of wheat and barley that were apparently
inexhaustible. Even the helpless indolence of Sidon had been surprised
into activity and change. There was nothing left of the straggling
settlement to recall its former aspect. The site of Harkutt's old store
and dwelling was lost and forgotten in the new mill and granary that
rose along the banks of the creek. Decay leaves ruin and traces for the
memory to linger over; prosperity is unrelenting in its complete and
smiling obliteration of the past.

But Tasajara City, as the embarcadero was now called, had no previous
record, and even the former existence of an actual settler like the
forgotten Elijah Curtis was unknown to the present inhabitants. It was
Daniel Harkutt's idea carried out in Daniel Harkutt's land, with Daniel
Harkutt's capital and energy. But Daniel Harkutt had become Daniel
Harcourt, and Harcourt Avenue, Harcourt Square, and Harcourt House,
ostentatiously proclaimed the new spelling of his patronymic. When the
change was made and for what reason, who suggested it and under what
authority, were not easy to determine, as the sign on his former store
had borne nothing but the legend, Goods and Provisions, and his name did
not appear on written record until after t