I groaned again. The Great Nauvoo and Nebraska Railway was evidently as brittle a speculation as Alnaschar’s basket of glass. I finished the ride to Keosauque in moody reverie. There was no other guest to share such rugged plenty as the wooden tavern, called by courtesy the Eagle Hotel, could afford; and as the landlord was absent, and the landlady busy in the management of her children and Irish helps, no one talked to me, and I sat sullen and dejected the whole evening. Next day, tired as I was, I set out again, under Ichabod’s guidance, to visit what he persisted in naming Harvey’s Folly. We reached the spot at last. A swampy level, intersected by runlets of water, and with a good deal of thorny brake, and here and there a clump of cottonwood poplars diversifying the scene, had been selected by Mr Harvey for the site of his preliminary operations. Why he had chosen that wet ground at all, when so much dry prairie lay beyond, of very tolerable smoothness, it is difficult to conjecture; but perhaps the more accurate level had tempted him. There were rails, certainly there were rails, half-hidden by the growth of hemlocks and rank grass; but on dismounting I discovered that, for lack of proper metal trams, the rails had been constructed of _wood_, covered with a thin slip of iron—not an unusual device in out-of-the-way parts of America, as I was afterwards told. The fastenings were very defective, the sleepers loose, and the whole concern had a crazy haphazard look. Such as they were, these precious rails were continued for about 5 miles—5 miles out of 350!—and then they terminated in a mass of ruin and confusion. There were roofless sheds, scantlings and screens blown down by hurricane gusts, heaps of rusty iron, broken tools, damaged wheelbarrows, and a shattered truck with only one wheel left. Also there were a quantity of sleepers of dressed oak, and the fragments of many more, split by the axe and charred to coal, as they lay around the blackened spots of burnt turf, where many a camp-fire had been lit by the frontiersmen. That was all the valuable property left at the disposal of the directors. The sight sickened me. “Harvey’s Folly,” muttered I between my teeth, “say rather Bulkeley’s Folly—Bulkeley’s credulity, idiocy, weakness! And not only mine, but Tom Harris’s, and that of all of us. What a long-eared pack were we to be lured by the crafty piping of such a dissembling knave as that glib Colonel!” I rode away, sad and careworn. Ichabod’s quaint talk was unnoticed. I had another companion that claimed my undivided attention, and that was Care, Black Care, which sat crouching behind my saddle. I was haunted by a ghastly phantom of impending bankruptcy. The London Gazette spread its ill-omened sheet before me, and in its fatal columns I read, in flaming characters, “George Bulkeley, of Cannon Street in the City of London, and Stamford Hill, Middlesex, to surrender at Portugal Street on Monday the 14th inst.