`Heyday!' cried Martin, as his eye rested on a great plan which occupied one whole side of the office. Indeed, the office had little else in it, but some geological and botanical specimens, one or two rusty ledgers, a homely desk, and a stool. `Heyday! what's that?'
`That's Eden,' said Scadder, picking his teeth with a sort of young bayonet that flew out of his knife when he touched a spring.
`Why, I had no idea it was a city.'
`Hadn't you? Oh, it's a city.'
A flourishing city, too! An architectural city! There were banks, churches, cathedrals, market-places, factories, hotels, stores, mansions, wharves; an exchange, a theatre; public buildings of all kinds, down to the office of the Eden Stinger, a daily journal; all faithfully depicted in the view before them.
`Dear me! It's really a most important place!' cried Martin turning round.
`Oh! it's very important,' observed the agent.
`But, I am afraid,' said Martin, glancing again at the Public Buildings, `that there's nothing left for me to do.'
`Well! it ain't all built,' replied the agent. `Not quite.'
This was a great relief.
`The market-place, now,' said Martin. `Is that built?'
`That?' said the agent, sticking his toothpick into the weathercock on the top. `Let me see. No: that ain't built.'
`Rather a good job to begin with. Eh, Mark?' whispered Martin nudging him with his elbow.
Mark, who, with a very stolid countenance had been eyeing the plan and the agent by turns, merely rejoined `Uncommon!'
A dead silence ensued, Mr. Scadder in some short recesses or vacations of his toothpick, whistled a few bars of Yankee Doodle, and blew the dust off the roof of the Theatre.
`I suppose,' said Martin, feigning to look more narrowly at the plan, but showing by his tremulous voice how much depended, in his mind, upon the answer; `I suppose there are -- several architects there?'
`There ain't a single one,' said Scadder.
`Mark,' whispered Martin, pulling him by the sleeve, `do you hear that? But whose work is all this before us, then?' he asked aloud.
`The soil being very fruitful, public buildings grows spontaneous, perhaps,' said Mark.
He was on the agent's dark side as he said it; but Scadder instantly changed his place, and brought his active eye to bear upon him.
`Feel of my hands, young man,' he said.
`What for?' asked Mark, declining.
`Air they dirty, or air they clean, sir?' said Scadder, holding them out.