shamefully frequent on the Pacific coast for a while. Once more, in my

self-complacent simplicity I felt that the time had arrived for me to

rise up and be a reformer. I put this reformatory satire in the shape

of a fearful "Massacre at Empire City." The San Francisco papers were

making a great outcry about the iniquity of the Daney Silver-Mining

Company, whose directors had declared a "cooked" or false dividend, for

the purpose of increasing the value of their stock, so that they could

sell out at a comfortable figure, and then scramble from under the

tumbling concern. And while abusing the Daney, those papers did not

forget to urge the public to get rid of all their silver stocks and

invest in sound and safe San Francisco stocks, such as the Spring Valley

Water Company, etc. But right at this unfortunate juncture, behold the

Spring Valley cooked a dividend too! And so, under the insidious mask of

an invented "bloody massacre," I stole upon the public unawares with my

scathing satire upon the dividend-cooking system. In about half a column

of imaginary human carnage I told how a citizen had murdered his wife

and nine children, and then committed suicide. And I said slyly, at the

bottom, that the sudden madness of which this melancholy massacre was the

result had been brought about by his having allowed himself to be

persuaded by the California papers to sell his sound and lucrative Nevada

silver stocks, and buy into Spring Valley just in time to get cooked

along with that company's fancy dividend, and sink every cent he had in

the world.

Ah, it was a deep, deep satire, and most ingeniously contrived. But I

made the horrible details so carefully and conscientiously interesting

305

Sketches New and Old