Do you know, Furlong, that when we approached them first with a proposition for a renewal for a hundred and fifty years they held us up! Said it was too long! Imagine that! A hundred and fifty years (only a century and a half) too long for the franchise! They expect us to install all our poles, string our wires, set up our transformers in their streets and then perhaps at the end of a hundred years find ourselves compelled to sell out at a beggarly valuation.

Of course we knew what they wanted.
They meant us to hand them over fifty dollars each to stuff into their rascally pockets." "Outrageous!" said Mr.Furlong.
"And the same thing with the cemetery land deal," went on Mr.Lucullus Fyshe.

"Do you realize that, if the movement hadn't come along and checked them, those scoundrels would have given that rogue Schwefeldampf four hundred thousand dollars for his fifty acres! Just think of it!" "I don't know," said Mr.Furlong with a thoughtful look upon his face, "that four hundred thousand dollars is an excessive price, in and of itself, for that amount of land." "Certainly not," said Mr.Fyshe, very quietly and decidedly, looking at Mr.Furlong in a searching way as he spoke.

"It is _not_ a high price.
It seems to me, speaking purely as an outsider, a very fair, reasonable price for fifty acres of suburban land, if it were the right land.

If, for example, it were a case of making an offer for that very fine stretch of land, about twenty acres, is it not, which I believe your Corporation owns on the _other_ side of the cemetery, I should say four hundred thousand is a most modest price." Mr.Furlong nodded his head reflectively.
"You had thought, had you not, of offering it to the city ?" said Mr.
Fyshe.
"We did," said Mr.Furlong, "at a more or less nominal sum--four hundred thousand or whatever it might be.