he ground'
scrawled on the flank of a strayed freight-car by some man who had lost
his money and gone away; the conferences at street corners of syndicates
six hours established by men not twenty-five years old; the outspoken
contempt for the next town, also 'on the boom,' and, therefore, utterly
vile; the unceasing tramp of heavy feet on the board pavement, where
stranger sometimes turns on stranger in an agony of conviction, and,
shaking him by the shoulder, shouts in his ear, 'By G--d! Isn't it
grand? Isn't it glorious? 'and last, the sleep of utterly worn-out men,
three in each room of the shanty hotel: 'All meals two dollars. All
drinks thirty-five cents. No washing done here. The manager not
responsible for anything.' Does the bald catalogue of these recitals
leave you cold? It is possible; but it is also possible after three days
in a new town to set the full half of a truck-load of archbishops
fighting for corner lots as they never fought for mitre or crozier.
There is a contagion in a boom as irresistible as that of a panic in a
theatre.

After a while things settle down, and then the carpenter, who is also an
architect, can lay his bare arms across the bar and sell them to the
highest bidder, for the houses are coming up like toadstools after rain.
The men who do not build cheer those who do, in that building means
backing your belief in your town--yours to you and peculiarly. Confound
all other towns whatsoever. Behind the crowd of business men the weekly
town paper plays as a stockwhip plays on a mob of cattle. There is
honour, heaped, extravagant, imperial for the good--the employer of
labour, the builder of stores, the spender of money; there is abuse,
savage and outrageous, for the bad, the man who 'buys out of the town,'
the man who intends to go, the sitter on the fence; with persuasion and
invitation in prose, verse, and zincograph for all that outside world
which prefers to live in cities other than Ours.

Now the editor, as often as not, begins as a mercenary and ends as a
patriot. This, too, is all of a piece with human nature. A few years
later, if Providence is good, comes the return for judicious investment.
Perhaps the town has stood the test of boom, and that which was
clapboard is now Milwaukee brick or dressed stone, vile in design but
permanent. The shanty hotel is the Something House, with accommodation
for two hundred guests. The manager who served you in his shirt-sleeves
as his own hot