If this were a History of Metropolisville—­but it isn’t, and that is enough.  You do not want to hear, and I do not want to tell you, how Dave Sawney, like another Samson, overthrew the Philistines; how he sauntered into the room where all the county officers did business together, he and his associates, at noon, when most of the officers were gone to dinner; how he seized the records—­there were not many at that early day—­loaded them into his wagon, and made off.  You don’t want to hear all that.  If you do, call on Dave himself.  He has told it over and over to everybody who would listen, from that time to this, and he would cheerfully get out of bed at three in the morning to tell it again, with the utmost circumstantiality, and with such little accretions of fictitious ornament as always gather about a story often and fondly told.  Neither do you, gentle reader, who read for your own amusement, care to be informed of all the schemes devised by Plausaby for removing the county officers to their offices, nor of the town lots and other perquisites which accrued to said officers.  It is sufficient for the purposes of this story that the county-seat was carted off to Metropolisville, and abode there in basswood tabernacles for a while, and that it proved a great advertisement to the town; money was more freely invested in Metropolisville, an “Academy” was actually staked out, and the town grew rapidly.  Not alone on account of its temporary political importance did it advance, for about this time Plausaby got himself elected a director of the St. Paul and Big Gun River Valley Land Grant Railroad, and the speculators, who scent a railroad station at once, began to buy lots—­on long time, to be sure, and yet to buy them.  So much did the fortunes of Plausaby, Esq., prosper that he began to invest also—­on time and at high rates of interest—­in a variety of speculations.  It was the fashion of ’56 to invest everything you had in first payments, and then to sell out at an advance before the second became due.

But it is not about Plausaby or Metropolisville that I meant to tell you in this chapter.  Nor yet about the wooing of Charlton.  For in his case, true love ran smoothly.  Too smoothly for the interest of this history.  If Miss Minorkey had repelled his suit, if she had steadfastly remained cold, disdainful, exacting, it would have been better, maybe, for me who have to tell the story, and for you who have to read it.  But disdainful she never was, and she did not remain cold.  The enthusiasm of her lover was contagious, and she came to write and talk to him with much earnestness.  Next to her own comfort and peace of mind and her own culture, she prized her lover.  He was original, piquant, and talented.  She was proud of him, and loved him with all her heart.  Not as a more earnest person might have loved; but as heartily as she could.  And she came to take on the color of her lover’s habits of thought and feeling; she expressed herself even more warmly