should be a free American citizen. There was no intention of giving away
the island for nothing, and so the reserve price had been fixed at
$1,100,000. This amount for a financial society dealing with such
matters was a mere bagatelle, if the transaction could offer any
advantages; but as we need hardly repeat, it offered none, and competent
men attached no more value to this detached portion of the United
States, than to one of the islands lost beneath the glaciers of the
Pole.

In one sense, however, the amount was considerable. A man must be rich
to pay for this hobby, for in any case it would not return him a
halfpenny per cent. He would even have to be immensely rich for the
transaction was to be a "cash" one, and even in the United States it is
as yet rare to find citizens with $1,100,000 in their pockets, who would
care to throw them into the water without hope of return.

And Congress had decided not to sell the island under the price. Eleven
hundred thousand dollars, not a cent less, or Spencer Island would
remain the property of the Union.

It was hardly likely that any one would be mad enough to buy it on the
terms.

Besides, it was expressly reserved that the proprietor, if one offered,
should not become king of Spencer Island, but president of a republic.
He would gain no right to have subjects, but only fellow-citizens, who
could elect him for a fixed time, and would be free from re-electing him
indefinitely. Under any circumstances he was forbidden to play at
monarchy. The Union could never tolerate the foundation of a kingdom, no
matter how small, in American waters.

This reservation was enough to keep off many an ambitious millionaire,
many an aged nabob, who might like to compete with the kings of the
Sandwich, the Marquesas, and the other archipelagoes of the Pacific.

In short, for one reason or other, nobody presented himself. Time was
getting on, the crier was out of breath in his efforts to secure a
buyer, the auctioneer orated without obtaining a single specimen of
those nods which his estimable fraternity are so quick to discover; and
the reserve price was not even mentioned.

However, if the hammer was not wearied with oscillating above the
rostrum, the crowd was not wearied with waiting around it. The joking
continued to increase, and the chaff never ceased for a moment. One
individual offered two dollars for the island, costs included. Another
said that a man ought to be paid that f