THE other burlesque I have referred to was my fine 

 satire upon the financial expedients of "cooking 

 ^^^B^^^m^.. dividends," a thing which became shamefully fre- 



quent on the Pacific coast for a while. Once more, in my 

 self-complacent simplicity, I felt that the time had arrived 

 for me to rise up and be a reformer; , I put this reformatory 

 satire in the shape of a fearful " Massacre at Empire City." 

 The San Francisco papers were making a great outcry 

 about the iniquity cf the Daney Silver-Mining Company, 

 whose directors had declared a "cooked " or false dividend, 

 for the purpose of increasing the value of their stock, so 

 that they could sell out at a comfortable figure, and then 

 scrarpble from under the tumbling concern. And while abusing the Daney, 

 those papers did not forget to urge the public to get rid of all their silver 



243 



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