THE REFORM AT RED ANT
exactly and have the privilege of permanently locating us that many miles in the heated hereafter. Anyway, the expression of good-will was very chaste.
"But we forgot him and his narrow views in our new surroundings. The first thing that impressed us, once we'd commenced the trip to Dawson, was the lack of municipal improvements and high public spirit. Of course you couldn't expect the average citizen to wax warm and zealous while living in a snow-drift, and thus I put it to Tib. But he insisted the only time to begin the discipline of a dump was when the dump was born. He argued that if a town is taken kindly, but firmly, in hand at its inception, and if civic pride is administered in small doses, you can't help but have a model habitat as the years prance by. He admitted it is wellnigh impossible to achieve in a minute any lasting results here in the East, and that the good must be taken with the bad. But in new parcels of our country, he contended, where towns bloom overnight, it can be done if the place is permeated with respectability at the start. And say, when it came to doctoring and nursing a seedy, disreputable centre of alleged civilization, I suppose Tiberius Smith ranked four miles ahead of all other physicians. He was certainly a doctor of towns and ought to have had a degree to that effect. Tiberius Smith, T.D.; not so bad, eh?
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