early promise. In fact, it was slipping back and down the hill with
a run. Already five out of its seven big saw-mills were idle and
rotting. Its original architect had sunk to a blue-faced and
lachrymose bar-loafer, and the roll of plans which he carried about
with him--with their unrealised boulevards, churches, municipal
buildings, and band-kiosks--had passed into a dismal standing joke.
Hewson was even now deliberating whether to throw up the game or toss
good money after bad by buying up a saw-mill and running it as his
predecessor had done.

"'It's like a curse,' he explained to me at breakfast next morning.
'The place is afflicted like one of those unfortunate South Sea
potentates, who flourish up to the age of fourteen and then cypher
out, and not a soul to know why. First of all, there's the
lumbering. Well, here's the timber all right; only Bellefont,
farther down the valley, has cut us out. Then we had the cinnabar
mines--you may see them along the slope to northward, right over the
west end of the town. They went well for about sixteen months; and
then came the stampede. A joker in the _Bellefont Sentinel_ wrote
that the miners up in Eucalyptus were complaining of the
'insufficiency of exits'; and he wasn't far out. Last there were the
'Temperate Airs and Reinvigorating Pine-odours of America's Peerless
Sanatorium. _Come and behold: Come and be healed!_' The promoters
billed that last cursed jingle up and down the States till as far
south as Mexico it became the pet formula for an invitation to drink.
Well, for three years we averaged something like a couple of hundred
invalids, and doctors in fair proportion; and I never heard that
either did badly. It was an error of judgment, perhaps, to start our
municipal works with a costly Necropolis, or rather the gateway of
one; two marble pillars, if you please--the only stonework in