Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: September 8, 2025
And where good men worked or perished is now a row of little shops, all devoted to the sale of town-lots in some distant spot that must infallibly become a great city in the next two years, and in the doorway of each lounges a thin- chested, much-spitting youth, with a flabby face, shifty eyes, and an inhuman mouth, who invites you continually, with the most raucous of American accents, to "step inside and ex-amine our Praposition."
He purchased an immense tract of ground, had beautiful plans drawn and painted, and very soon there appeared, upon paper, one of the largest and handsomest cities in the world. There were colleges and public squares, penitentiaries, banks, taverns, whisky-shops, and fine walks. I hardly need say, that this town-manufacturer was a Yankee, who intended to realize a million by selling town-lots.
The headlong stampede to the new place; the money dashed down like counters for merest daily bread; the arrival of the piled cars whence the raw material of a city men, lumber, and shingle are shot on to the not yet nailed platform; the slashing out and pegging down of roads across the blank face of the wilderness; the heaving up amid shouts and yells of the city's one electric light a raw sizzling arc atop of an unbarked pine pole; the sweating, jostling mob at the sale of town-lots; the roar of 'Let the woman have it! that stops all bidding when the one other woman in the place puts her price on a plot; the packed real-estate offices; the real-estate agents themselves, lost novelists of prodigious imagination; the gorgeous pink and blue map of the town, hung up in the bar-room, with every railroad from Portland to Portland meeting in its heart; the misspelled curse against 'this dam hole in the ground' scrawled on the flank of a strayed freight-car by some man who had lost his money and gone away; the conferences at street corners of syndicates six hours established by men not twenty-five years old; the outspoken contempt for the next town, also 'on the boom, and, therefore, utterly vile; the unceasing tramp of heavy feet on the board pavement, where stranger sometimes turns on stranger in an agony of conviction, and, shaking him by the shoulder, shouts in his ear, 'By G d!
In America, when a "city" is to be started, the first thing is to divide up the land into town-lots and then sell these lots to whoever will buy. This is a very modern scheme. But in Ireland whole villages belong to one man, and every one in the place pays tribute.
His word was, 'No Irish need apply! But it didn't make no difference about that when it came down to what a man's rights was and so, when some roughs jumped the Catholic bone-yard and started in to stake out town-lots in it he went for 'em! And he cleaned 'em, too! I was there, pard, and I seen it myself."
His word was, 'No Irish need apply! But it didn't make no difference about that when it came down to what a man's rights was and so, when some roughs jumped the Catholic bone-yard and started in to stake out town-lots in it he went for 'em! And he cleaned 'em, too! I was there, pard, and I seen it myself."
"The boys would give him whisky to tell them stories when he went to Brandon for the creamery, and at last he went there continually. He fell in with some men from Winnipeg who lent him money, and I think they gambled in town-lots, for Tom took the little I had saved, and used to come home rambling about a fortune.
After the silent, and all but untasted, meal, Elizabeth left the house by the rear entrance. She hurried along the walk, out through the wicket gate at the back, and down to the beach. From here she turned into the path that zigzagged across town-lots, over sand-dunes, through brush heaps, to the rear of the Captain's place. She walked round the house to the side door.
Upon the land, he generally managed to find an eligible town-site; and, being a perfect master of the art of building cities on paper, and puffing them into celebrity, his sales of town-lots usually brought him a competent fortune.
"Suppose," said he, "this amendment is adopted by three-fourths of the States and becomes a part of the Constitution, and after its adoption the State of South Carolina should re-instate her old constitution, striking out the word 'white, and re-establishing the property qualification of fifty acres of land or town-lots or the payment of taxes, there would then be no discrimination of color in South Carolina; yet, while the number of her voters would not be enlarged five hundred, the representation would be exactly as it is, with the addition of two-fifths of the enfranchised freedmen."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking