Men and women seem alike to love to have their counsels taken; and the equinox being now gone by, Mrs. Busk was ready to begin before the tardy sun was up, who begins to give you short measure at once when he finds the weights go against him. Mrs. Busk considered not the sun, neither any of his doings. The time of day was more momentous than any of the sun's proceedings. Railway time was what she had to keep (unless a good customer dropped in), and as for the sun--“clock slow, clock fast,” in the almanacs, showed how he managed things; and if that was not enough, who could trust him to keep time after what he had done upon the dial of Ahaz? Reasoning thus--if reason it was--she packed me off in a fly for the nearest railway station, and by midday I found the Major laboring on his ramparts. After proper salutations, I could not help expressing wonder at the rapid rise of things. Houses here and houses there, springing up like children's teeth, three or four in a row together, and then a long gap, and then some more. And down the slope a grand hotel, open for refreshment, though as yet it had no roof on; for the Major, in virtue of his charter, defied all the magistrates to stop him from selling whatever was salable on or off the premises. But noblest and grandest of all to look at was the “Bruntsea Athenaeum, Lyceum, Assembly-Rooms, Institution for Mutual Instruction, Christian Young Men's Congress, and Sanitary, Saline, Hydropathic Hall, at nominal prices to be had gratis.” “How you do surprise me!” I said to Major Hockin, after reading all that, which he kindly requested me to do with care; “but where are the people to come from?” “Erema,” he replied, as if that question had been asked too often, “you have not had time to study the laws of political economy--the noblest of noble sciences. The first of incontrovertible facts is that supply creates demand. Now ask yourself whether there could even be a Yankee if ideas like yours had occurred to Columbus?” This was beyond me; for I never could argue, and strove to the utmost not to do so. “You understand those things, and I do not,” said I, with a smile, which pleased him. “My dear aunt Mary always says that you are the cleverest man in the world; and she must know most about it.” “Partiality! partiality!” cried the Major, with a laugh, and pulling his front hair up. “Such things pass by me like the idle wind; or rather, perhaps, they sadden me, from my sense of my own deficiencies. But, bless me! dinner must be waiting. Look at that fellow's trowel--he knows: he turns up the point of it like a spoon. They say that he can smell his dinner two miles off. We all dine at one o'clock now, that I may rout up every man-Jack of them.” The Major sounded a steam-guard's whistle, and led me off in the rapidly vanishing wake of his hungry workmen. CHAPTER XLV CONVICTION