Never was Capital so thoroughly hated as in Davy's Bend. It was cursed a thousand times a day, and shown to be fickle and foolish and ungrateful; for evidences of these weaknesses on the part of Capital abounded on every hand. There were railroads to be built out of Davy's Bend that would pay immensely, as had been demonstrated times without number by the local paper; but Capital stubbornly refused to build them, preferring to earn a beggarly per cent elsewhere. There were manufactories to be built in Davy's Bend that would make their owners rich, as every child knew; but Capital, after a full investigation, was so dull that it could not see the opportunity. The town was alive with opportunities for profitable investments, but Capital, with a mean and dogged indifference, refused to come to Davy's Bend; therefore Capital was hated, and bullied, and cursed, and denounced; and it was generally agreed that it deserved no better fate than to go to ruin in the general crash that would finally overtake Ben's City. The people of Davy's Bend were a good deal like a grumbling and idle man, who spends the time which should be devoted to improving his condition to grumbling about his own ill luck and the good luck of his industrious rival, who is steadily prospering; and as men frequently believe that the fates are against them when they are themselves their only opposition, so it was generally believed in this wretched little town that some sort of a powerful and alert goddess was in league with Ben's City. While they readily admitted their own points of advantage, even to the extent of giving themselves more credit than they deserved, they refused to be equally fair with their competitor, as men do, and contended, with an ignorant persistency, that Ben's City was prosperous because of "luck," whereas they should have known that there is no such thing, either good or bad. But, in course of time, when they found that they would always be in the rear, no difference whether they liked it or not, the people of the Bend, in order to more thoroughly denounce their own town for its lack of ability to attract Capital, began to exaggerate the importance of Ben's City. A four-story building there became seven stories high, and those who visited the place vied with each other in giving vivid and untruthful accounts of its growth and prosperity on their return; all of which their acquaintances repeated over and over, though they knew it to be untrue, even adding to the exaggerated statements, in order to bully their own meek town.