V. "The fact is that Monterey
County is not organized, but is attached to the county south of it for
judicial purposes. Let me whisper in your ear that it will soon be
organized, and that the county-seat will not be Monterey Centre, but
Lithopolis--that classic municipality whose sonorous name will be the
admiration of all true Americans and the despair of the spelling classes
in our schools. Lithopolis! It has the cadence of Alexander, and
Alcibiades, and Numa Pompilius, and Belisarius--it reeks of greatness!
Monterey Centre--ever been there? Ever seen that poverty-stricken,
semi-hamlet, squatting on the open prairie, and inhabited by a parcel of
dreaming Nimshies?"
"No," said I; "have you?"
"No," he replied. "What difference does it make? He that goeth up
against Lithopolis and them that dwell therein, the same is a
dreaming Nimshi."
The beginnings of faction were in our town-sites; for most of them were
in no sense towns, or even villages. There was a future county-seat
fight in the rivalry between Monterey Centre and Lithopolis--and not
only these, but in the rival rivalries of Cole's Grove, Imperial City,
Rocksylvania, New Baltimore, Cathedral Rock, Waynesville and I know not
how many more projects, all ambitiously laid out in the
still-unorganized county of Monterey, and all but one or two now quite
lost to all human memory or thought, except as some diligent abstractor
of titles or real-estate lawyer discovers something of them in the chain
of title of a farm; the spires and gables of the 'fifties realized only
in the towering silo, the spinning windmill, or the vine-clad porch of a
substantial farm-house.
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