quire in a way that said, "Trust _me_! I'm no fool!"

CHAPTER XVIII.

A COLLISION.

If this were a History of Metropolisville--but it isn't, and that is
enough. You do not want to hear, and I do not want to tell you, how Dave
Sawney, like another Samson, overthrew the Philistines; how he sauntered
into the room where all the county officers did business together, he and
his associates, at noon, when most of the officers were gone to dinner;
how he seized the records--there were not many at that early day--loaded
them into his wagon, and made off. You don't want to hear all that. If
you do, call on Dave himself. He has told it over and over to everybody
who would listen, from that time to this, and he would cheerfully get out
of bed at three in the morning to tell it again, with the utmost
circumstantiality, and with such little accretions of fictitious ornament
as always gather about a story often and fondly told. Neither do you,
gentle reader, who read for your own amusement, care to be informed of
all the schemes devised by Plausaby for removing the county officers to
their offices, nor of the town lots and other perquisites which accrued
to said officers. It is sufficient for the purposes of this story that
the county-seat was carted off to Metropolisville, and abode there in
basswood tabernacles for a while, and that it proved a great
advertisement to the town; money was more freely invested in
Metropolisville, an "Academy" was actually staked out, and the town grew
rapidly. Not alone on account of its temporary political importance did
it advance, for about this time Plausaby got himself elected a director
of the St. Paul and Big Gun River Valley Land Grant Railroad, and the
speculators, who scent a railroad station at once, began to buy lots--on
long time, to be sure, and yet to buy them. So much did the fortunes of
Plausaby, Esq., prosper that he began to invest also--on time and at high
rates of interest--in a variety of speculations. It was the fashion of
'56 to invest everything you had in first payments, and then to sell out
at an advance before the second became due.

But it is not about Plausaby or Metropolisville that I meant to tell you
in this chapter. Nor yet about the wooing of Charlton. For in his case,
true love ran smoothly. Too smoothly for the interest of this history. If
Miss Minorkey had repelled his suit, if she had steadfastly remained
cold, disdainful, exacting, it would have been