Beadle's Dime Novels No. 38: The Wrong Man — page 74: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

16 THE WRONG MAN. by means which ought to have insured defeat, is a great Gen- eral, so not a few of the visionary schemers and extravagant speculators who sought to be founders of great cities in the West, have earned a reputation for wisdom and foresight by those very projects which, when they were framed, excited the derision of all sensible men. This remark applies to Adrianopolis. All the gigantic views of its founder, to be sure, are even yet not realized ; but the disparity between the plan and the reality is so much diminished, as at least to de- prive one of all just ground of ridicule. At the date of our story, however, Adrianopolis was in its infancy. The town consisted of a few houses, most of them log-cabins of the humblest description, which straggled at long and irregular intervals on either side of a wide road, called Main street, by way of distinction, though there was no other. Among these lowly edifices, there were some of a more ambi- tious appearance. One of them, a stately but unfinished brick-house, displayed upon its front the word BANK, denoting that it was one of those manufactories of a paper substitute for money, which became so numerous in the western country a few years after, and from the evil effects of whose over-issues some portions of that country were long in recovering. In another place there was a row of some five or six houses, like- wise of brick, none of which seemed finished, and a part uninhabited, while others were hastening to decay from being occupied by persons of a description greatly inferior to that of the buildings. There was an uncomfortable air of newness about every thing. The smoke of brick-kilns mingled with that of the houses they were preparing materials to complete. Heaps of chips, shavings and rubbish, before every door, showed that the edifice had just started into being. The stumps of the forest-trees were still standing in the road, some freshly cut, and others blackened by fire; and “the green wood” yet waved its embowering branches over the place designated in the map as the Public Square. So important an incident as that of the body of a murdered man being picked up in the river and brought to the village, naturally created a great sensation among the little commu- nity of Adrianopolis. The night was not yet far advanced; though many of the simple inhabitants—having neither comicloooks.conn