e took toward building
it was to invest in a high hat, a long coat and white vest, and a pair
of mouse-coloured trousers. With these and his theory he went East and
returned with a condition. The canning factory went up, but the railroad
rates went wrong, and the factory was never opened. Alphabetical
blinked at it through his gold-rimmed glasses for a few weeks, and then
organised a company to turn it into a woollen mill. He elected himself
president of that company and used to bring around to our paper, notices
of directors' meetings, and while he was in the office he would insist
that we devoted too much space to idle gossip and not enough to the
commercial and industrial interests of the Queen City.

At times he would bring in an editorial that he had written himself,
highly excitable and full of cyclonic language, and if we printed it
Alphabetical would buy a hundred copies of the paper containing it and
send them East. His office desk gradually filled with woodcuts and zinc
etchings of buildings that never existed save in his own dear old head,
and about twice a year during the boom days he would bring them around
and have a circular printed on which were the pictures showing the
imaginary public buildings and theoretical business thoroughfares of the
Queen City.

The woollen mill naturally didn't pay, and he persuaded some Eastern
capitalists to install an electric plant in the building and put a
streetcar line in the town, though the longest distance from one side of
the place to the other was less than ten blocks. But Alphabetical was
enthusiastic about it, and had the Governor come down to drive the first
spike. It was gold-plated, and Alphabetical pulled it up and used it for
a paper-weight in his office for many years, and it is now the only
reminder there is in town of the street railway, except a hard ridge of
earth over the ties in the middle of Main Street. When someone twitted
him on the failure of the street railway he made answer:

"Of course it failed; here I go pawing up the earth, milking out the
surplus capital of the effete East, and building up this town--and what
happens? Four thousand old silurian fossils comb the moss on the north
side of 'em, with mussel shell, and turn over and yawp that old
Alphabetical is visionary. Here I get a canning factory and nobody eats
the goods; I hustle up a woollen factory, and the community quits
wearing trousers; I build for them a streetcar line to haul th