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twenty-five thousand bucks at going rates. And if you bought it in ’34, you paid about two hundred and fifty to three hundred dollars for it, and that will make you very unhappy that you didn’t buy a thousand feet, but you can still sneer gently and happily at the dullards who neglected to buy any. Now, if your two-hundred-footchunk should run from Horseshoe Drive east to the bay, you are not precisely as happy because in that event your land is only worth eleven thousand—but then, you could have picked that up for sixty dollars in ’34.
    John Long bought his fifteen hundred feet of bay frontage running through to Horseshoe Drive for ten thousand dollars in 1943. I know because I looked it up at the courthouse. Which makes it worth, at going rates, eighty-two thousand, five hundred dollars.
    Herewith, for the benefit of those who like to think about money, I present the mathematics of made land. John Long started with fifteen hundred feet of bay front worth fifty-five dollars a foot. He had riparian rights to fill out as far as the inland waterways channel some nine hundred feet out in the bay. So he had the dredge make him a long finger of land three hundred feet wide, stretching from his property out to the channel. That left him with just twelve hundred of his original fifteen hundred feet of land. But, measuring the shoreline of the finger he built, he got his three hundred right back, plus eighteen hundred more. So he not only ended up with thirty-three hundred feet of water front, worth a total of a hundred and eighty-one thousand, five hundred, but, in the process, the dredge mooched out a private channel very handy for the boats of the people who would live in the houses on the made land. Dredges and sea walls are expensive, but on a quantity operation like John Long’s he got more land value back than he put out.
    Then, with a drag line setup, he ran the new channel right back into the heart of the original property. That made interior lots more desirable, and also provided a nice topping to spread over the new finger. Out on Horseshoe Drive an impressivearched entrance gate was erected. A road with a thin crust of blacktop was laid in contrived and gentle curves from said entrance gate out to the end of the finger. Two tributaries wandered around the rest of the property. Fifty-six building lots were surveyed and the corners were socked in. Power was run in. Artesian wells hit sulphurous water at a hundred and sixty-two feet, and they were capped, awaiting the houses. John started at the end of the finger, working back.
    I drove through the arched entrance and down the winding asphalt. Out at the end of the finger two houses were already up. At the neck of the finger the foundations were sketched in. The houses in between were in various stages of completion on the new raw land. The day was overcast, and sticky as gym socks. From talking to Big Dake, I knew the plans. Two- and three-bedroom houses, CB construction, no two floor plans or exteriors exactly alike. Terazzo floors and cypress and weldwood paneling and pine kitchens and picture windows and window walls and big closets and storage walls and breezeways and terraces and a look of spaciousness. The price, per copy, including the land, of course, would be between thirty-six five to forty-eight thousand. And the construction cost per unit, exclusive of land and fill and dozing, would be such as to give an average profit of twelve thousand per house, which makes a gross of six hundred and seventy-two thousand, from which you must subtract the raw cost of making new land and protecting it with a sea wall.
    It was the thing, I knew, that John Long had been preparing for. As I got out of my car and looked around, I could sense how it would be. Lawns and landscaping and sprinklerswhirling and kids bicycling up to Horseshoe Drive to check the mailbox, and people sitting on terraces directly over where the trout had browsed through the weeds, where mullet had