THE DISPOSAL OF A BONANZA.

321

see a good big self-complacent town twenty years ago. Town that
was county-seat of a great and important county; town with a big
United States marine hospital; town of innumerable fights—an
inquest every day - town where I had used to know the prettiest girl,

arid the most accomplished in the whole
Mississippi Valley; town where we were
handed the first printed news of the
4 Pennsylvania's * mournful disaster a quarter of a century ago;
a town no more—swallowed up, vanished, gone to feed the fishes;
nothing left but a fragment of a shanty and a crumbling brick
chimney!