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Then advisin him to keep away from the Peter Funk sections of the East, and the proprietors of corner-lots in the West, I bid him farewell, and went away. There was a levee at Senator What's-his-name's, and I thought I'd jine in the festivities for a spell. Who should I see but she that was Sarah Watkins, now the wife of our Congresser, trippin in the dance, dressed up to kill in her store close.
Even now, through the thin disguise of honest-seeming phrases, one can see the bait of the land-shark who speculated in imaginary titles to claims, or sold corner-lots in bubble-towns.
With the rail comes the telegraph; and whispers of the rise and fall of fancies and potatoes, of speculations and elections, of the sale of corner-lots and the evasion of bank-officers, are darting about in every direction over our heads, as we unconsciously admire the sunset, or sketch a knot of rosy children as they come trooping from a quaint school-house on the prairie edge.
The one sees projected on the outer world his own imaginings, now fair, now gloomy; while the other sees in the world, land to be cut up into corner-lots for speculation, and water for sawmills and cotton-mills, and to float clipper-ships and steamers. The one is this-worldly; the other is other-worldly.
The article in question has the very flavor of the golden age of Indian contracts, corner-lots, six per cent a month, and mortgages with waiver clauses. There, is also visible, I fear, a little of the prejudice which existed at that time in Perritaut against Metropolisville.
Yet I could not quite make him out, for while he was surely professional, he was not exactly clerical, in spite of a certain Scotch-Covenanter-something in his appearance. He had never preached at men, I knew, as instinctively as I knew he had never persuaded them with books or stocks or corner-lots in Lhassa.
I used to have a drawer in my desk I called my "fool drawer." I kept my investments in it. I mean, the investments I did not have to lock up. You get the pathos of that the investments nobody wanted to steal. And whenever I would get unduly inflated I would open that drawer and "view the remains." I had in that drawer the deed to my Oklahoma corner-lots. Those lots were going to double next week.
Major Morse was president of a company which, perceiving a promising site for harbor and town on the shore of Michigan, where yet the Indian charmed the deer, secured a tract of land and proceeded to lay out an inviting town of corner-lots. The major's family occupied temporarily a wide log house, with a rough "lean-to" of bright pine boards freshly cut at the mill below.
I am afraid he said some things which the liberalism of to-day would think unfit we all have heresies nowadays; it is quite the style. But at least the old man reminded them that there were better investments than corner-lots, and that even mortgages with waivers in them will be brought into judgment. His solemn words could not have failed entirely of doing good.
I have written enough in this melancholy strain. Why should I pause to describe in detail the solemn services held in the grove by the lake? It is enough that the land-shark forgot his illegal traffic in claims; the money-lender ceased for one day to talk of mortgages and per cent and foreclosure; the fat gentleman left his corner-lots.
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