surface and soon exhausted, the population migrates to other points. The once populous town of Georgia, in the Middle Park in Colorado, which was built by gold-washers, is still standing, with its Town Hall, two theatres, and streets of log-houses, and is now without a solitary inhabitant. Of course its Town Hall and theatres were of very simple wooden construction, but they were once really used for the purposes their names imply.

In a new town which is brevetted a "city" as soon as there is more than one house, the rumseller follows hard on the footsteps of the settler; then comes the lawyer, who immediately runs as candidate for county offices, foments grievances, and shows each man how he can get the better of his neighbor. If there be a military post near by, the officers are good game for him, they being pecuniarily responsible, and obliged to obey the laws, which seem to be so construed as to enable a sheriff to arrest a whole column of troops even if setting out on a campaign. The lawyer's process of getting money out of the military officers is easy and very simple. A practitioner secures a witness who will depose to anything, perjury being looked on more as a joke than as a crime, and so never punished. The action or suit may be for pretty much anything; it was, in one case, for the alleged illegal detention of an animal which the learned judge described as a "Rhone ox," further stating that such detention was a "poenel" offence. But the unfortunate officer who obeys the summons, however ridiculous may be the cause of action, must employ one of the horde of lawyers to defend him, so that, whichever way the suit may be decided, he at least is compelled to contribute something to the support of the frontier bar. In the Territories justice is enforced when the United States judge of the district comes on his circuit, but there is no redress or compensation for the worry and expense of litigation. If damages could be given against the concocter of the conspiracy, it would be difficult to find any property to satisfy the claim, and a hint of punishment would only cause him to remove to some other place. The army officer on the frontier has a soldier's dread of legal complications, and may be made thoroughly unhappy by suits which in the East would only be laughed at. A general idea of law is taught at West Point, but not more than one third of the commissions are held by graduates of the Military Academy, and these graduates find their general knowledge of law speedily growing rusty, while it never included the minute details of the kind of suits to which they are subjected by frontier pettifoggers. With fewer opportunities than the business man at the East of knowing the nature of court practice, they fall victims to any attorney who brazenly begins a prosecution founded on his own familiarity with legal tricks and the assumed wrongs of his client. Nothing, for example, is more common than for ranches to be damaged and hay or grain burned through the carelessness of emigrants, hunters, or other people who have camped near by, and on breaking camp have left the camp-fire to take care of itself: a wind springing up fans the embers into sparks, and these set fire to the dry grass. Now, although troops on the march are by strict orders compelled, on breaking camp, to extinguish their fires with water or by covering them with earth, the ranchman who can show a burned fence or scorched barn (knowing that during the term of his natural life he might sue anybody else but an army officer any number of times without ever actually recovering damages) immediately finds out what military command has been within some miles of his ranch during some days or weeks before the fire, and straightway goes to a lawyer and swears that the fire was set by the troops. He brings eager witnesses to show that the fire travelled just the requisite