I looked about that stricken reach of alkali, and followed him wondering. That evening the Hon. Ralph Truax-Steele, Oxon, showed me his real estate and also, unwittingly, the disordered workings of his brain. The rest I guessed and afterwards confirmed. Steele had gone mad over the real estate "boom" that had struck the town five years previously, when land was worth as many dollars as could cover it, and men and women fought with each other to buy lots around the water hole called Amethyst Lake. The "boom" had collapsed, and with it Steele’s reason, for to him the boom was on the point of recommencing; sane enough on other points, in this direction the man’s grip upon himself was gone for good. "There," he said to me that evening as we crushed our way through the sagebrush, indicating a low roll on the desert surface, "there are my villa sites, here will run a driveway, and yonder where you see the skeleton of that steer I’m thinking of putting up a little rustic stone chapel." "Ralph, Ralph," I said, "come out of this. Can’t you see that the whole business is dead and done for long since? You’re going back with me to God’s country to-morrow—going back to your wife, you and the boy. She sent me to fetch you." He stared at me wonderingly. "Why, it’s bound to come within a few days," he said. "Wait till next Wednesday, say, and you won’t recognise this place. There’ll be a rush here such as there was when Oklahoma was opened. We have everything for us—climate, temperature, water. Harry," he added in my ear, "look around you. You are standing on the site of one of the grandest, stateliest cities of civilisation." That night the boy Carrington and I sat late in consultation while Steele slept. "Nothing but force will do it," said the lad. "I know him well, and I’ve tried it again and again. It’s no use any other way." So force it was. How we got Steele back to San Diego I may not tell. Carrington is the only other person who knows, and I’m sure he will say nothing. When Steele found himself in the heart of a real city and began to look about him, and take stock of his surroundings, the real collapse came. He is in a sanitarium now somewhere in Illinois, and his wife and son see him on Wednesday and Sunday afternoons from two till five. Steele will never come out of that sanitarium, though he now realises that his desert city was a myth, a creation of his own distorted wits. He’s sound enough on that point, but a strange inversion has taken place. It is now upon all other subjects that he is insane. _*The Dis-Associated Charities*_ There used to be a place in feudal Paris called the Court of Miracles, and Mister Victor Hugo has told us all about it. This Court was a quarter of the town where the beggars lived, and it was called "of the miracles", because once across its boundaries the blind saw, the lame walked and the poor cared not to have the gospel preached unto them.