Chapter LI

Vice flourished luxuriantly during the hey-day of our "flush times." The
saloons were overburdened with custom; so were the police courts, the
gambling dens, the brothels and the jails--unfailing signs of high
prosperity in a mining region--in any region for that matter. Is it not
so? A crowded police court docket is the surest of all signs that trade
is brisk and money plenty. Still, there is one other sign; it comes
last, but when it does come it establishes beyond cavil that the "flush
times" are at the flood. This is the birth of the "literary" paper.
The Weekly Occidental, "devoted to literature," made its appearance in
Virginia. All the literary people were engaged to write for it. Mr. F.
was to edit it. He was a felicitous skirmisher with a pen, and a man who
could say happy things in a crisp, neat way. Once, while editor of the
Union, he had disposed of a labored, incoherent, two-column attack made
upon him by a contemporary, with a single line, which, at first glance,
seemed to contain a solemn and tremendous compliment--viz.: "THE LOGIC OF
OUR ADVERSARY RESEMBLES THE PEACE OF GOD,"--and left it to the reader's
memory and after-thought to invest the remark with another and "more
different" meaning by supplying for himself and at his own leisure the
rest of the Scripture--" in that it passeth understanding." He once said
of a little, half-starved, wayside community that had no subsistence
except what they could get by preying upon chance passengers who stopped
over with them a day when traveling by the overland stage, that in their
Church service they had altered the Lord's Prayer to read: "Give us this
day our daily stranger!"

We expected great things of the Occidental. Of course it could not get
along without an original novel, and so we made arrangements to hurl into
the work the full strength of the company. Mrs. F. was an able romancist
of the ineffable school--I know no other name to apply to a school whose
heroes are all dainty and all perfect. She wrote the opening chapter,
and introduced a lovely blonde simpleton who talked nothing but pearls
and poetry and who was virtuous to the verge of eccentricity. She also
introduced a young French Duke of aggravated refinement, in love with the
blonde. Mr. F. followed next week, with a brilliant lawyer who set about
getting the Duke's estates into trouble, and a sparkling young lady of
high society who fell to fascinating the Duke and impairing the appetite
of the blonde. Mr. D., a dark and bloody editor of one of the dailies,
followed Mr. F., the third week, introducing a mysterious Roscicrucian
who transmuted metals, held consultations with the devil in a cave at
dead of night, and cast the horoscope of the several heroes and heroines
in such a way as to provide plenty of trouble for their