Haynton and its environs simply quivered with excitement over all the news and personal property which the farmer brought back; but it experienced deeper thrills when the old man told his neighbors that he knew of a plan by which they might get rid of their ridge-land for an amount of money the mere interest of which would bring them more profit than the crops coaxed from that thin soil. The plan would benefit them still more should the buyer’s project succeed, for a lot of cottagers would make a brisk cash market for the vegetables which Haynton ground produced so easily, and which Haynton farmers moaned over because they could not at present sell the surplus at any price, much less at the figures which their agricultural newspapers told them were to be obtained in large cities. Would they take ten dollars per acre for their ridge-land, the money to be forfeited unless the remainder of two hundred per acre were paid within a year? Would they? Well, they consented with such alacrity that the farmer soon had to write to New York for more currency. Before Thanksgiving Day the Haynton Bay Improvement Company controlled a full mile of shore front, and there was more money in circulation in the village than could be remembered except by the oldest inhabitant, who was reminded of the good old times when in 1813 a privateer, built and manned in Haynton’s little bay, had carried a rich prize into New York and come home to spend the proceeds. Small mortgages were paid off, dingy houses appeared in new suits of paint, several mothers in Israel bought new Sunday dresses, two or three farmers gave their old horses and some money for better ones, the aisle of one church was carpeted and another church obtained the bell that for years had been longed for, a veteran pastor had fifty dollars added to his salary of four hundred a year, and got the money, too, several families began to buy parlor-organs, on the instalment plan, one farmer indulged in the previously unheard-of extravagance of taking his family, consisting of his wife and himself, to New York to spend the winter, and another dedicated his newly-found money and his winter-enforced leisure to the reprehensible work of drinking himself to death.