And remember this is no imaginary case. I am giving point by point the exact transactions of a real Petroleum Company. Everything I have told was done, only if possible with a more false and baseless impudence than I have described. And scores and scores of other Petroleum Companies have been organized in ways exactly as unprincipled. Some of them may perhaps have proceeded as real business concerns. Some have stopped and disappeared as soon as the managers could get a handsome sum of money into their pockets for stock. What the result will be, in the present case, I don't know. The New York and Rangoon Petroleum Company, when I last knew about it, "still lived." They had--or said they had--bought some land. I have not heard of their receiving any oil raised from their own wells. They have sent off a monstrous quantity of circulars, prospectuses and advertisements. They caused a portrait and biography of the Honorable A. Bee to be printed in a very respectable periodical, and paid five hundred dollars for it. They had themselves systematically puffed up to the seventh heaven in a long series of articles in another periodical, and paid the owner of it $2,000 or so _in stock_. They talk very big about a dividend. But although they have received a great deal of money, and paid out a great deal, I do not know of their paying their stockholders any yet. If they should, it would not prove much. For it is sometimes considered "a good dodge" to declare and pay a large dividend before any real profits have been earned; as this is calculated to enhance the price of shares, and to make them "go off like hot cakes." I shall not make any "moral" about this story. It teaches its own. It is a very mild statement of what was done to establish an actual specimen,--and far from being of the worst description--of a great part of the Petroleum Company enterprises of the day. It is whispered that somehow or other the trustees and officers of the New York and Rangoon do not own so much stock of their company as they did, having managed to have their stock sold to subscribers as if it were company stock. If this is so, those gentlemen have made their reward sure; and Mr. Peter Rolleum, having the cash in hand for that very liberal allotment of stock which he gave himself for his trouble in getting up the New York and Rangoon Petroleum Company, is very likely half or a quarter as rich as he says. CHAPTER XXV. THE TULIPOMANIA. Alboni, the singer, had an exquisitely sweet voice, but was a very big fat woman. Somebody accordingly remarked that she was an elephant that had swallowed a nightingale. About as incongruous is the idea of a nation of damp, foggy, fat, full-figured, broad-sterned, gin-drinking, tobacco-smoking Dutchmen in Holland, going crazy over a flower. But they did so, for three or four years together. Their craze is known in history as the Tulipomania, because it was a mania about tulips. Just a word about the Dutchmen first.