Mr. Townsend, with all his love of money, had a certain degree of integrity about him, more the result of education as a merchant of the old school than any thing else. The scheme proposed, he took a day to reflect on, seriously. He looked at it in its incipiency, progress, and termination, and saw that, although he might make twenty or thirty thousand dollars, by selling off his stock when it had reached the highest price to which their forcing system could raise it, others would lose all he made; for the stock must inevitably fall in price. In fact, he saw that he would make himself a party to a fraud upon the public, and this he was unwilling to do. So he refused to enter into this scheme. Cleveland then proposed to sell him out his interest in “Eldorado,” that he might have more means, and a freer mind, to enter into the Eagle Bank speculation--a thing that he said he was determined to do. “I have already sold lots enough to pay for the original purchase, and now own nearly half of the town,” he said. “What will you take for your interest?” Mr. Townsend asked. “Forty thousand dollars; and I wouldn’t part with it for less than double the price, were it not for my determination to push through this matter of the Eagle Bank. In six months you can sell lots enough to clear the whole purchase, and still be owner of at least a third of the town. Come into my counting-room, and let me point out to you the singular advantages that ‘Eldorado’ possesses.” Mr. Townsend went to the store of the ardent speculator, to look at the city on paper. There stood “Eldorado,” all laid off into streets and city squares, with churches and public buildings scattered about it quite thickly. In the centre was a large depot, where two extensive lines of railroad crossed each other at right angles; and upon each, at points east, west, north, and south, were long trains of passenger and burden cars, gliding towards, or rushing away from the city. Across the stream, upon the banks of which it stood, dams had been thrown, and flour-mills and extensive factories were seen, admirably located, and furnished with water-power that was inexhaustible. “All this,” said Cleveland, sweeping his hand around an imaginary vast extent of country to the southwest of “Eldorado,” “is a wheat-growing country, one of the finest in the world. From sixty to a hundred bushels to the acre is the common yield. The mills will, therefore, always have the fullest supply of grain. And this,” sweeping his hand as before, but to the north of the city, “is a hilly country, admirable for sheep, and the farmers are already finding it to their advantage to graze them. Along the rich vallies that lie to the east, millions of bushels of corn and thousands of head of cattle are annually raised, for which ‘Eldorado’ will be the great entrepot. In five years from this time, I prophesy that it will be the third city in the State, and, in ten years, but little behind any city in the West.”