CINCINNATUS FUDGE.*

A VICTIM OF MONOPOLY.

INCINNATUS FUDGE was compelled at last

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to succumb to the inevitable. He failed. It had long been predicted that this would be the case, but the catastrophe had been, from time to time, so often postponed, on account of his persistent obstinacy, that financial prophecy in this particular instance seemed to be at fault.

However, at last, it had come to pass, and another prominent victim to the ruthless and cruel tyranny of bloated Monopoly stood revealed.

The business life of another noted Fudge was ended, and the Juggernaut of civilization rolled ruthlessly onward to crush other victims that were certain to fall beneath its cruel wheels.

As the highest type of a representative class that is still numerous upon the earth, it may be somewhat interesting to review the career of this particular Fudge and note the successive stages of injury that ended in his downfall.

The farm which once was his, (now by recent Sheriff sale transferred to one Chris Schmidt,) was in the old days that preceded the advent of the Railway Engineers, (those advanced pickets of tyrants,) as promis*"The Railroad Problem." By A. B. Stickney. 1891.

ing a farm as Fudgeville could boast. It was a square quarter section of land lying just one mile east of Fudgeville on the Claptown pike. Through it ran meandering Chipmuck Creek, along the banks of which was about sixty acres of as fine blue joint meadow land as could be found in the State. The remaining one hundred acres were high, dry, rolling prairie, all suitable for cultivation.

The father of Cincinnatus, the late John Fudge, according to tradition, had frequently mowed with a scythe on this meadow land three tons per acre of the choicest blue grass hay, while upon the remaining land he had invariably every year raised most wonderful crops of grain. This was in the old days before the modern mowing machine was invented, or gang plows, or grain drills, or twine binders.

It was really pathetic, as well as interesting, to hear Cincinnatus, as his own financial troubles began to thicken around him, recount the primitive ways of his father John in carrying on the farm. Cincinnatus would sit for hours, if he could find a listener, explaining how his father mowed his grass with a scythe. How he hoed his corn with a hoe. How he sowed his grain by hand and how he cut it with a cradle. This and much more, with all the variations, would he retail by the hour to rapt listeners, his admiring neighbors, whenever the subject, "Modern Feudalism," and how to get rid of it, was the theme under discussion. more he talked upon this great subject and the more distressed he grew financially, the more eloquent he

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became over the giant infamy which had, notwithstanding the superior advantages he had enjoyed over his father by reason of the labor-saving machinery of the present time, still kept him financially in a much worse condition. The logic of the situation was of itself unanswerable.

His father had despite his lack of agricultural machinery; despite his total lack of a foreign market; somehow managed to get along; had lived comfortably; raised his family decently; and in due time dying of old age had left to his son the farm unencumbered, while he, Cincinnatus, had from the very hour he assumed control of this inheritance, been going year by year from bad to worse, until now, long before he was an old man and ready to die, the farm had been wrested from him by the Sheriff, and he and his children were practically paupers. There was but one conclusion to which this statement of affairs led, to wit, something was radically wrong somewhere. Of course it could not be because of the want of intellectual capacity in Cincinnatus, for he was undoubtedly a wiser man than his father had been. John Fudge, the father, had possessed but a very limited education. Cincinnatus, the son, had not only absorbed the learning of a graded high school, but had also drawn largely upon the resources of the Fudgeville Academy. John Fudge, the father, had read but just one newspaper during his entire life, and that had been a weekly. Cincinnatus, the son, was a regular subscriber to several weeklies, to four monthly magazines, and to three

dailies. The father had no books in his house, but the Bible, Hale's History of the United States, the English Reader and Fox's Book of Martyrs. The son had a library in his, comprising all the standard works of Fiction, History, Biography, Political Economy and Science. Thus it must be evident to everybody that the failure of the son on the farm was not because he was more ignorant than his father had been before him, for he certainly was not.

As day by day Cincinnatus felt his financial grip loosening upon the old homestead, the more eagerly did his active mind try to discover the cause of it. His keen perceptive faculties were not long in finding out who was the destroyer of his peace, and the real wrecker of his fortunes.

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The corporate name of this legal monster was Fudgeville Air Line Railway." This was the conclusion to which all his thinking tended. This was the despotism which had crushed the life out of his struggling manhood, backed though it had been by a good education and by all kinds of labor-saving machinery, wholly unknown to his father.

Here Cincinnatus Fudge took his stand, and, while standing here like a rock firm and immovable, failed.

There was nothing left after the Sheriff's sale to call his own. Farm, live stock, machinery, all, everything was swept away, engulfed as it were in the maw of this ruthless destroyer. It was well worth hearing his frequent, eloquent, pathetic explanation to sympathizing neighbors. He pictured it all. How this monster