Echoes, sir.  His first purchase was an echo in Georgia that repeated four times; his next was a six-repeater in Maryland; his next was a thirteen-repeater in Maine; his next was a nine-repeater in Kansas; his next was a twelve-repeater in Tennessee, which he got cheap, so to speak, because it was out of repair, a portion of the crag which reflected it having tumbled down.  He believed he could repair it at a cost of a few thousand dollars, and, by increasing the elevation with masonry, treble the repeating capacity; but the architect who undertook the job had never built an echo before, and so he utterly spoiled this one.  Before he meddled with it, it used to talk back like a mother-in-law, but now it was only fit for the deaf-and-dumb asylum.  Well, next he bought a lot of cheap little double-barreled echoes, scattered around over various states and territories; he got them at twenty per cent. off by taking the lot.  Next he bought a perfect Gatling-gun of an echo in Oregon, and it cost a fortune, I can tell you.  You may know, sir, that in the echo market the scale of prices is cumulative, like the carat-scale in diamonds; in fact, the same phraseology is used.  A single-carat echo is worth but ten dollars over and above the value of the land it is on; a two-carat or double-barreled echo is worth thirty dollars; a five-carat is worth nine hundred and fifty; a ten-carat is worth thirteen thousand.  My uncle’s Oregon-echo, which he called the Great Pitt Echo, was a twenty-two carat gem, and cost two hundred and sixteen thousand dollars—­they threw the land in, for it was four hundred miles from a settlement.

Well, in the mean time my path was a path of roses.  I was the accepted suitor of the only and lovely daughter of an English earl, and was beloved to distraction.  In that dear presence I swam in seas of bliss.  The family were content, for it was known that I was sole heir to an uncle held to be worth five millions of dollars.  However, none of us knew that my uncle had become a collector, at least in anything more than a small way, for esthetic amusement.

Now gathered the clouds above my unconscious head.  That divine echo, since known throughout the world as the Great Koh-i-noor, or Mountain of Repetitions, was discovered.  It was a sixty-five carat gem.  You could utter a word and it would talk back at you for fifteen minutes, when the day was otherwise quiet.  But behold, another fact came to light at the same time:  another echo-collector was in the field.  The two rushed to make the peerless purchase.  The property consisted of a couple of small hills with a shallow swale between, out yonder among the back settlements of New York State.  Both men arrived on the ground at the same time, and neither knew the other was there.  The echo was not all owned by one man; a person by the name of Williamson Bolivar Jarvis owned the east hill, and a person by the name of Harbison J. Bledso owned the west hill; the swale between was the dividing-line.  So while my uncle was buying Jarvis’s hill for three million two hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars, the other party was buying Bledso’s hill for a shade over three million.