[8] The editor acknowledges the invaluable assistance of Honorable N.V.  Creede in the editing of the proofs of this and a few other passages.—­G.v.d.M.

“I thought you were going to Monterey Centre,” I said.

“Not if the court knows itself,” he said, “and it thinks it does.  Lithopolis is the permanent town in Monterey County, and Monterey Centre is the mushroom.”

4

Monterey County, like all the eastern counties of Iowa, all the counties along the Missouri, and every other county which was crossed by a considerable river, was dotted with paper towns.  We passed many of these staked-out sites on the Old Ridge Road; and we heard of them from buyers of and dealers in their lots.

Lithopolis was laid out by Judge Horace Stone, the great outsider in the affairs of the county until he died.  He platted a town in Howard County when the town-lot fever first broke out, at a place called Stone’s Ferry, and named it Lithopolis, because his name was Stone, and for the additional reason that there was a stone quarry there.  I’ve been told that the word means Stone City.  The people insisted upon calling it Stone’s Ferry and would not have the name Lithopolis.  Judge Stone raved and tore, but he was voted down, and pulled up stakes in disgust, sold out his interests and went on to Monterey County, where he could establish a new city and name it Lithopolis.  He seemed to care more for the name than anything else, and never seemed to see how funny it was that he felt it possible to make a city wherever he decreed.  This was a part of the spirit of the time.  The prairies were infested with Romuluses and Remuses, flourishing, not on the milk of the wolves, but seemingly on their howls, of which they often gave a pretty fair imitation.

“But Monterey Centre is the county-seat,” I suggested.

“It just thinks it’s going to be,” said N.V.  “The fact is that Monterey County is not organized, but is attached to the county south of it for judicial purposes.  Let me whisper in your ear that it will soon be organized, and that the county-seat will not be Monterey Centre, but Lithopolis—­that classic municipality whose sonorous name will be the admiration of all true Americans and the despair of the spelling classes in our schools.  Lithopolis!  It has the cadence of Alexander, and Alcibiades, and Numa Pompilius, and Belisarius—­it reeks of greatness!  Monterey Centre—­ever been there?  Ever seen that poverty-stricken, semi-hamlet, squatting on the open prairie, and inhabited by a parcel of dreaming Nimshies?”

“No,” said I; “have you?”

“No,” he replied.  “What difference does it make?  He that goeth up against Lithopolis and them that dwell therein, the same is a dreaming Nimshi.”