Did you ever pass the remains of a "boom" town in your travels? Did you never gaze upon the remains of "Bunk City," where but yesterday all was life and bustle, and to-day it looks like the ruins of Babylon? The empty fields for miles and miles around are laid off and dug up in streets, and look like they had been struck with ten thousand streaks of chain lightning. Standing here and there are huge frames holding up mammoth sign boards, bearing the names of land companies, but the land companies are gone. Half driven nails are left to rust in a few old skeleton buildings, the brick lies unmortared in half finished walls, and tenantless houses stand here and there like the ghosts of buried hope. Down by the river stands the furnace, grim and silent as the extinct crater of Popocatepetl; and the great hotel on the hill looks like the tower of Babel two thousand years after the confusion of tongues. The last of the speculators, with his blue nose and his old battered plug hat which resembles an accordion that has been yanked by a cyclone, stands on the corner and contemplates his old sedge fields which have shrunk in value from one hundred dollars a front foot, to one dollar for a hundred front acres, and balefully sings a new song:

"After the boom is over, after the panic's on,

After the fools are leavin', after the money's gone,

Many a bank is "busted," if we could see in the room,

Many a pocket is empty, after the boom."