el clerk, is gorgeous in broadcloth, and needs to be
reminded of the first meeting. Suburban villas more or less adorn the
flats, from which the liveliest fancy (and fancy was free in the early
days) hung back. Horse-cars jingle where the prairie schooner used to
stick fast in the mud-hole, scooped to that end, opposite the saloon;
and there is a Belt Electric Service paying fabulous dividends. Then, do
you, feeling older than Methuselah and twice as important, go forth and
patronise things in general, while the manager tells you exactly what
sort of millionaire you would have been if you had 'stayed by the town.'

Or else--the bottom has tumbled out of the boom, and the town new made
is dead--dead as a young man's corpse laid out in the morning. Success
was not justified by success. Of ten thousand not three hundred remain,
and these live in huts on the outskirts of the brick streets. The hotel,
with its suites of musty rooms, is a big tomb; the factory chimneys are
cold; the villas have no glass in them, and the fire-weed glows in the
centre of the driveways, mocking the arrogant advertisements in the
empty shops. There is nothing to do except to catch trout in the stream
that was to have been defiled by the city sewage. A two-pounder lies
fanning himself just in the cool of the main culvert, where the alders
have crept up to the city wall. You pay your money and, more or less,
you take your choice.

By the time that man has seen these things and a few others that go
with a boom he may say that he has lived, and talk with his enemies in
the gate. He has heard the Arabian Nights retold and knows the inward
kernel of that romance, which some? little folk say is vanished. Here
they lie in their false teeth, for Cortes is not dead, nor Drake, and
Sir Philip Sidney dies every few months if you know where to look. The
adventurers and captains courageous of old have only changed their dress
a little and altered their employment to suit the world in which they
move. Clive came down from Lobengula's country a few months ago
protesting that there was an empire there, and finding very few that
believed. Hastings studied a map of South Africa in a corrugated iron
hut at Johannesburg ten years ago. Since then he has altered the map
considerably to the advantage of the Empire, but the heart of the Empire
is set on ballot-boxes and small lies. The illustrious Don Quixote
to-day lives on the north coast of Australia where he has foun