fund and the
appropriation for interest due.

The youth of Okochee--they who were to carry into the rosy future the
burden of the debt--accepted failure with youth's uncalculating joy.
For, here was sport, aquatic and nautical, added to the meagre round of
life's pleasures. In yachting caps and flowing neckties they pervaded
the lake to its limits. Girls wore silk waists embroidered with
anchors in blue and pink. The trousers of the young men widened at the
bottom, and their hands were proudly calloused by the oft-plied oar.
Fishermen were under the spell of a deep and tolerant joy. Sailboats
and rowboats furrowed the lenient waves, popcorn and ice-cream booths
sprang up about the little wooden pier. Two small excursion steamboats
were built, and plied the delectable waters. Okochee philosophically
gave up the hope of eating turtle soup with a gold spoon, and settled
back, not ill content, to its regular diet of lotus and fried hominy.
And out of this slow wreck of great expectations rose up J. Pinkney
Bloom with his "wad" and his prosperous, cheery smile.

Needless to say J. Pinkney was no product of Georgia soil. He came out
of that flushed and capable region known as the "North." He called
himself a "promoter"; his enemies had spoken of him as a "grafter";
Okochee took a middle course, and held him to be no better nor no worse
than a "Yank."

Far up the lake--eighteen miles above the town--the eye of this
cheerful camp-follower of booms had spied out a graft. He purchased
there a precipitous tract of five hundred acres at forty-five cents per
acre; and this he laid out and subdivided as the city of Skyland--the
Queen City of the Switzerland of the South. Streets and avenues were
surveyed; parks designed; corners of central squares reserved for the
"proposed" opera house, board of trade, lyceum, market, public schools,
and "Exposition Hall." The price of lots ranged from five to five
hundred dollars. Positively, no lot would be priced higher than five
hundred dollars.

While the boom was growing in Okochee, J. Pinkney's circulars, maps,
and prospectuses were flying through the mails to every part of the
country. Investors sent in their money by post, and the Skyland Real
Estate Company (J. Pinkney Bloom) returned to each a deed, duly placed
on record, to the best lot, at the price, on hand that day. All this
time the catamount screeched upon the reserved lot of the Skyland Board
of Trade, the opossum