number handed down by the various
courts before and after that celebrated session,--opinions on the
validity of leases, on the extension of railroads, on the rights of
individual stockholders--all dry reading enough.

At the risk of being picked to pieces by the corporation lawyers who may
read these pages, we shall attempt to state the situation and with all
modesty and impartiality--for we, at least, hold no brief. When Mr. Isaac
D. Worthington obtained that extension of the Truro Railroad (which we
have read about from the somewhat verdant point of view of William
Wetherell), that railroad then formed a connection with another road
which ran northward from Harwich through another state, and with which we
have nothing to do. Having previously purchased a line to the southward
from the capital, Mr. Worthington's railroad was in a position to compete
with Mr. Duncan's (the "Central") for Canadian traffic, and also to cut
into the profits of the "Northwestern," Mr. Lovejoy's road. In brief, the
Truro Railroad found itself very advantageously placed, as Mr.
Worthington and Mr. Flint had foreseen. There followed a period of
bickering and recrimination, of attempts of the other two railroads to
secure representation in the Truro directorate, of suits and injunctions
and appeals to the Legislature and I know not what else--in all of which
affairs Mr. Bijah Bixby and other gentlemen we could name found both
pleasure and remuneration.

Oh, that those halcyon days of the little wars would come again, when a
captain could ride out almost any time at the held of his band of
mercenaries and see honest fighting and divide honest spoils! There was
much knocking about of men and horses, but very little bloodshed, so we
are told. Mr. Bixby will sit on the sunny side of his barns in Clovelly
and tell you stories of that golden period with tears in his eyes, when
he went to conventions with a pocketful of proxies from the river towns,
and controlled in the greatest legislative year of all a "block" which
included the President of the Senate, for which he got the fabulous sum
of----. He will tell you, but I won't. Mr. Bixby's occupation is gone
now. We have changed all that, and we are ruled from imperial Rome. If
you don't do right, they cut off your (political) head, and it is of no
use to run away, because there is no one to run to.

It was Isaac D. Worthington--or shall we say Mr. Flint?--who was
responsible for this pernicious ch