The Booming of Acre Hill, and Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life

Illustrated By C. Dana Gibson Published in New York and London, 1902.
TO WILLIAM LIVERMORE KINGMAN, WITH AFFECTIONATE REGARDS
These stories by Mr. Bangs have appeared from time to time in The Ladies Home Journal, The Woman's Home Companion , and the various publications of Messrs. HARPER & BROTHERS.
I. MR. AUGUSTUS RICHARDS'S IDEAL II. MISS HENDERSON'S STANDARD III. A GLANCE AT MISS FLORA HENDERSON HERSELF IV. A BRIEF GLIMPSE OF MR. AUGUSTUS RICHARDS V. CONCLUSION
I. THE RESOLVE II. A SUCCESSFUL CASE III. A SET-BACK IV. THE DEVICE

Acre Hill ten years ago was as void of houses as the primeval forest. Indeed, in many ways it suggested the primeval forest. Then the Acre Hill Land Improvement Company sprang up in a night, and before the bewildered owners of its lovely solitudes and restful glades, who had been paying taxes on their property for many years, quite grasped the situation they found that they had sold out, and that their old-time paradise was as surely lost to them as was Eden to Adam and Eve.
To-day Acre Hill is gridironed with macadamized streets that are lined with houses of an architecture of various degrees of badness. Where birds once sang, and squirrels gambolled, and stray foxes lurked, the morning hours are made musical by the voices of milkmen, and the squirrels have given place to children and nurse-maids. Where sturdy oaks stood like sentinels guarding the forest folk from intrusion from the outside world now stand tall wooden poles with glaring white electric lights streaming from their tops. And the soughing of the winds in the trees has given place to the clang of the bounding trolley. All this is the work of the Acre Hill Land Improvement Company.
Yet if, as I have said, the Acre Hill Land Improvement Company sprang up in a night, it passed many sleepless nights before it received the rewards which come to him who destroys Nature. And when I speak of a corporation passing sleepless nights I do so advisedly, for at the beginning of its career the Acre Hill Land Improvement Company consisted of one man—a mild-mannered man who had previously labored in similar enterprises, and whose name was called blessed in a thousand uncomfortable houses in uncomfortable suburbs elsewhere, that, like Acre Hill, had once been garden spots, but had been improved. Even a professional improver of land finds sleep difficult to woo at the beginning of such an enterprise. In the first instance, when one buys land, giving a mortgage in full payment therefor, with the land as security, one appears to have assumed a moderately heavy burden. Then, when to this one adds the enormous expense of cutting streets through the most beautiful of the sylvan glades, the building of sewers, and the erection of sample houses, to say nothing of the strain upon the intellect in the selection of names for the streets and lanes and circles that spring into being, one cannot but wonder how the master mind behind it all manages to survive.