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Few there are who have not heard of the Magic City, the Windy Wonder
of the West, the Peerless Princess of the Plains, and how it sprung up
mushroom-like in a night there at the forks of the Big Arkansas and
the Little Arkansas, where the Indians had pitched their tents and
Seth had lived and hoped and despaired, and how men went wild erecting
Colleges and Palaces and Temples and Watch Factories and buying up
town lots so far from the town that if the city had been built on all
of them it would have surpassed the marvellous tales of it written in
the newspapers, reached half way to Denver and become, instead of the
Magic City of the West, the Magic City of the World.
Seth had been a dreamer of dreams, but his vision of the Magic City
was not half so marvellous as the city itself.
Fortunes were made in a day and lost before midnight.
Men came from far and near, many from the other side of the water, and
bought town lots and sold them, bought still others and built tall
houses and planted great avenues of trees, cottonwood trees, the trees
of Seth's imaginings, trees that seemed also to spring up in a night,
they grew so magically, thrusting deep roots into the moist black soil
and greedily sucking up its moisture in a very madness of growing, and
laid off parks and sent flashing electric cars out into the large
farms and dangled big soft balls of electricity in the middle of the
streets that twinkled at eventide like big pale blinking fireflies.
Those who had formerly eked out a precarious enough existence in
dugouts, now lived in palaces, had their raiment fashioned by hands
Parisian, and gave receptions on a scale of such grandeur that the
flowers offered as souvenirs thereat would have kept many a wolf from
a dugout door for years, and a few Wise Men it was said lost their
heads in the mad whirl of speculation, but as that often happens in
the building up of any great city, not necessarily in the West, it
was not so surprising as it might have been.
Indeed, the World stood still a moment, agape at the wonder of the
Magic City, and there were those who, now that Seth had passed out of
the way of the wind into a country strange to them, spoke of him
reverently as Prophet and Seer, going so far as to express regret that
while within the sound of their voices they had carelessly dubbed him
a foolish dreamer of mad, fantastic and impossible dreams, yet
comforting themselves withal with the thought that they were not alone
in denying a Prophet honor in his own country, since so wagged the
world.