After a while things settle down, and then the carpenter, who is also an architect, can lay his bare arms across the bar and sell them to the highest bidder, for the houses are coming up like toadstools after rain.  The men who do not build cheer those who do, in that building means backing your belief in your town—­yours to you and peculiarly.  Confound all other towns whatsoever.  Behind the crowd of business men the weekly town paper plays as a stockwhip plays on a mob of cattle.  There is honour, heaped, extravagant, imperial for the good—­the employer of labour, the builder of stores, the spender of money; there is abuse, savage and outrageous, for the bad, the man who ‘buys out of the town,’ the man who intends to go, the sitter on the fence; with persuasion and invitation in prose, verse, and zincograph for all that outside world which prefers to live in cities other than Ours.

Now the editor, as often as not, begins as a mercenary and ends as a patriot.  This, too, is all of a piece with human nature.  A few years later, if Providence is good, comes the return for judicious investment.  Perhaps the town has stood the test of boom, and that which was clapboard is now Milwaukee brick or dressed stone, vile in design but permanent.  The shanty hotel is the Something House, with accommodation for two hundred guests.  The manager who served you in his shirt-sleeves as his own hotel clerk, is gorgeous in broadcloth, and needs to be reminded of the first meeting.  Suburban villas more or less adorn the flats, from which the liveliest fancy (and fancy was free in the early days) hung back.  Horse-cars jingle where the prairie schooner used to stick fast in the mud-hole, scooped to that end, opposite the saloon; and there is a Belt Electric Service paying fabulous dividends.  Then, do you, feeling older than Methuselah and twice as important, go forth and patronise things in general, while the manager tells you exactly what sort of millionaire you would have been if you had ‘stayed by the town.’

Or else—­the bottom has tumbled out of the boom, and the town new made is dead—­dead as a young man’s corpse laid out in the morning.  Success was not justified by success.  Of ten thousand not three hundred remain, and these live in huts on the outskirts of the brick streets.  The hotel, with its suites of musty rooms, is a big tomb; the factory chimneys are cold; the villas have no glass in them, and the fire-weed glows in the centre of the driveways, mocking the arrogant advertisements in the empty shops.  There is nothing to do except to catch trout in the stream that was to have been defiled by the city sewage.  A two-pounder lies fanning himself just in the cool of the main culvert, where the alders have crept up to the city wall.  You pay your money and, more or less, you take your choice.