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.
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