The letters swam before David's eyes.

Lucy came to the table, and, standing close behind David—so close that he felt her pure cool breath mingle with his hair, said to her uncle: "Mr. Talboys proposes to me to ride the first stage to-morrow; if I do, you must be of the party."

"Oh, must I? Well, I'll roll after you in my phaeton."

At this moment Eve could bear no longer the anguish on David's beloved face. It made her hysterical. She could hardly command herself. She rose hastily, and saying, "We must not keep you up the night before a journey," took leave with David. As he shook hands with Lucy, his imploring eye turned full on hers, and sought to dive into her heart. But that soft sapphire eye was unfathomable. It was like those dark blue southern waters that seem to reveal all, yet hide all, so deep they are, though clear.

Eve. "Thank Heaven, we are safe out of the house."

David. "I have got a rival."

Eve. "A pretty rival; she doesn't care a button for him."

David. "He rides the first stage with her."

Eve. "Well, what of that?"

David. "I have got a rival."

David was none of your lie-a-beds. He rose at five in summer, six in winter, and studied hard till breakfast time; after that he was at every fool's service. This morning he did not appear at the breakfast table, and the servant had not seen him about. Eve ran upstairs full of anxiety. He was not in his room. The bed had not been slept in; the impress of his body outside showed, however, that he had flung himself down on it to snatch an uneasy slumber.

Eve sent the girl into the village to see if she could find him or hear tidings of him. The girl ran out without her bonnet, partaking her mistress's anxiety, but did not return for nearly half an hour, that seemed an age to Eve. The girl had lost some time by going to Josh Grace for information. Grace's house stood in an orchard; so he was the unlikeliest man in the village to have seen David. She set against this trivial circumstance the weighty one that he was her sweetheart, and went to him first.

"I hain't a-sin him, Sue; thee hadst better ask at the blacksmith's shop," said Joshua Grace.

Susan profited by this hint, and learned at the blacksmith's shop that David had gone by up the road about six in the morning, walking very fast. She brought the news to Eve.

"Toward Royston?"

"Yes, miss; but, la! he won't ever think to go all the way to Royston—without his breakfast."

"That will do, Susan. I think I know what he is gone for."

On the servant retiring, her assumed firmness left her.

"On the road she is to travel! and his rival with her. What mad act is he going to do? Heaven have mercy on him, and me, and her!"

Eve knew what was in the man's blood. She sat trembling at home till she could bear it no longer. She put on her bonnet, and sallied out on the road to Royston, determined to stop the carriage, profess to have business at Royston, and take a seat beside Mr. Fountain. She felt that the very sight of her might prevent David from committing any great rashness or folly. On reaching the high road, she observed a fresh track of narrow wheels, that her rustic experience told her could only be those of a four-wheeled carriage, and, making inquiries, she found she was too late; carriage and riders had gone on before.

Her heart sank. Too late by a few minutes; but somehow she could not turn back. She walked as fast as she could after the gay cavalcade, a prey to one of those female anxieties we have all laughed at as extravagant, proved unreasonable, and sometimes found prophetic.

Meantime Lucy and Mr. Talboys cantered gayly along; Mr. Fountain rolled after in a phaeton; the traveling carriage came last. Lucy was in spirits; motion enlivens us all, but especially such of us as are women. She had also another cause for cheerfulness, that may perhaps transpire. Her two companions and unconscious dependents were governed by her mood. She made them larks to-day, as she had owls for some weeks past, last night excepted. She would fall back every now and then, and let Uncle Fountain pass her; then come dashing up to him, and either pull up short with a piece of solemn information like an aid-de-camp from headquarters, or pass him shooting a shaft of raillery back into his chariot, whereat he would rise with mock fury and yell a repartee after her. Fountain found himself good company—Talboys himself. It was not the lady; oh dear no! it never is.

At last all seemed so bright, and Mr. Talboys found himself so agreeable, that he suddenly recalled his high resolve not to pop in a county desecrated by Dodds. "I'll risk it now," said he; and he rode back to Fountain and imparted his intention, and the senior nearly bounded off his seat. He sounded the charge in a stage whisper, because of the coachman, "At her at once!"

"Secret conference? hum!" said Lucy, twisting her pony, and looking slyly back.

Mr. Talboys rejoined her, and, after a while, began in strange, melodious accents, "You will leave a blank—"

"Shall we canter?" said Lucy, gayly, and off went the pony. Talboys followed, and at the next hill resumed the sentimental cadence.

"You will leave a sad blank here, Miss Fountain."

"No greater than I found," replied the lady, innocently (?). "Oh, dear!" she cried, with sudden interest, "I am afraid I have dropped my comb." She felt under her hat. [No, viper, you have not dropped your comb, but you are feeling for a large black pin with a head to it. There, you have found it, and taken it out of your hair, and got it hid in your hand. What is that for?]

"Ten times greater," moaned the honeyed Talboys; "for then we had not seen you. Ah! my dear Miss Fountain— The devil! wo-ho, Goliah!"

For the pony spilled the treacle. He lashed out both heels with a squeak of amazement within an inch of Mr. Talboys' horse, which instantly began to rear, and plunge, and snort. While Talboys, an excellent horseman, was calming his steed, Lucy was condoling with hers. "Dear little naughty fellow!" said she, patting him ["I did it too hard"].

"As I was saying, the blessing we have never enjoyed we do not miss; but, now that you have shone upon us, what can reconcile us to lose you, unless it be the hope that— Hallo!"

Lucy. "Ah!"

The pony was off with a bound like a buck. She had found out the right depth of pin this time. "Ah! where is my whip? I have dropped it; how careless!" Then they had to ride back for the whip, and by this means joined Mr. Fountain. Lucy rode by his side, and got the carriage between her and her beau. By this plan she not only evaded sentiment, but matured by a series of secret trials her skill with her weapon. Armed with this new science, she issued forth, and, whenever Mr. Talboys left off indifferent remarks and sounded her affections, she probed the pony, and he kicked or bolted as the case might require.

"Confound that pony!" cried Talboys; "he used to be quiet enough."

"Oh, don't scold him, dear, playful little love. He carries me like a wave."

At this simple sentence Talboys' dormant jealousy contrived to revive. He turned sulky, and would not waste any more tenderness, and presently they rattled over the stones of Royston. Lucy commended her pony with peculiar earnestness to the ostler. "Pray groom him well, and feed him well, sir; he is a love." The ostler swore he would not wrong her ladyship's nag for the world.

Lucy then expressed her desire to go forward without delay: "Aunt will expect me." She took her seat in the carriage, bade a kind farewell to both the gentlemen now that no tender answer was possible, and was whirled away.

Thus the coy virgin eluded the pair.

Now her manner in taking leave of Talboys was so kind, so smiling (in the sweet consciousness of having baffled him), that Fountain felt sure it all had gone smoothly. They were engaged.

"Well?" he cried, with great animation.

"No," was the despondent reply.

"Refused?" screeched the other; "impossible!"

"No, thank you," was the haughty reply.

"What then? Did you change your mind? Didn't you propose after all?"

"I couldn't. That d—d pony wouldn't keep still."

Fountain groaned.

Lucy, left to herself, gave a little sigh of relief. She had been playing a part for the last twenty-four hours. Her cordiality with Mr. Talboys naturally misled Eve and David, and perhaps a male reader or two. Shall I give the clue? It may be useful to you, young gentlemen. Well, then, her sex are compounders. Accustomed from childhood never to have anything entirely their own way, they are content to give and take; and, these terms once accepted, it is a point of honor and tact with them not to let a creature see the irksome part of the bargain is not as delicious as the other. One coat of their own varnish goes over the smooth and the rough, the bitter and the sweet.

Now Lucy, besides being singularly polite and kind, was femme jusqu' au bout des ongles. If her instincts had been reasons, and her vague thoughts could have been represented by anything so definite as words, the result might have appeared thus:

"A few hours, and you can bore me no more, Mr. Talboys. Now what must I do for you in return? Seem not to be bored to-day? Mais c'est la moindre des choses. Seem to be pleased with your society? Why not? it is only for an hour or two, and my seeming to like it will not prolong it. My heart swells with happiness at the thought of escaping from you, good bore; you shall share my happiness, good bore. It is so kind of you not to bore me to all eternity."

This was why the last night she sat like Patience on an ottoman smiling on Talboys and racking David's heart; and this was why she made the ride so pleasant to those she was at heart glad to leave, till they tried sentiment on, and then she was an eel directly, pony and all.

Lucy (sola). "That is over. Poor Mr. Talboys! Does he fancy he has an attachment? No; I please and I am courted wherever I go, but I have never been loved. If a man loved me I should see it in his face, I should feel it without a word spoken. Once or twice I fancied I saw it in one man's eyes: they seemed like a lion's that turned to a dove's as they looked at me." Lucy closed her own eyes and recalled her impression: "It must have been fancy. Ought I to wish to inspire such a passion as others have inspired? No, for I could never return it. The very language of passion in romances seems so extravagant to me, yet so beautiful. It is hard I should not be loved, merely because I cannot love. Many such natures have been adored. I could not bear to die and not be loved as deeply as ever woman was loved. I must be loved, adored and worshiped: it would be so sweet—sweet!" She slowly closed her eyes, and the long lovely lashes drooped, and a celestial smile parted her lips as she fell into a vague, delicious reverie. Suddenly the carriage stopped at the foot of a hill. She opened her eyes, and there stood David Dodd at the carriage window.

Lucy put her head out. "Why, it is Mr. Dodd! Oh, Mr. Dodd, is there anything the matter?"

"No."

"You look so pale."

"Do I?" and he flushed faintly.

"Which way are you going?"

"I am going home again now," said David, sorrowfully.

"You came all this way to bid me good-by," and she arched her eyebrows and laughed—a little uneasily.

"It didn't seem a step. It will seem longer going back."

"No, no, you shall ride back. My pony is at the White Horse; will you not ride my pony back for me? then I shall know he will be kindly used; a stranger would whip him."

"I should think my arm would wither if I ill-used him."

"You are very good. I suppose it is because you are so brave."

"Me brave? I don't feel so. Am I to tell him to drive on?" and he looked at her with haggard and imploring eyes.

Her eyes fell before his.

"Good-by, then," said she.

He cried with a choking voice to the postilion, "Go ahead."

The carriage went on and left him standing in the road, his head upon his breast.

At the steepest part of the hill a trace broke, and the driver drew the carriage across the hill and shouted to David. He came running up, and put a large stone behind each wheel.

Lucy was alarmed. "Mr. Dodd! let me out."

He handed her out. The postboy was at a nonplus; but David whipped a piece of cord and a knife out of his pocket, and began, with great rapidity and dexterity, to splice the trace.

"Ah! now you are pleased, Mr. Dodd; our misfortune will elicit your skill in emergencies."

"Oh, no, it isn't that; it is—I never hoped to see you again so soon."

Lucy colored, and her eyes sought the ground; the splice was soon made.

"There!" said David; "I could have spent an hour over it; but you would have been vexed, and the bitter moment must have come at last."

"God bless you, Miss Fountain—oh! mayn't I say Miss Lucy to-day?" he cried, imploringly.

"Of course you may," said Lucy, the tears rising in her eyes at his sad face and beseeching look. "Oh, Mr. Dodd, parting with those we esteem is always sad enough; I got away from the door without crying—for once; don't you make me cry."

"Make you cry?" cried David, as it he had been suspected of sacrilege; "God forbid!" He muttered in a choking voice, "You give the word of command, for I can't."

"You can go on," said her soft, clear voice; but first she gave David her hand with a gentle look—"Good-by."

But David could not speak to her. He held her hand tight in both his powerful hands. They seemed iron to her—shaking, trembling, grasping iron. The carriage went slowly on, and drew her hand away. She shrank into a corner of the carriage; he frightened her.

He followed the carriage to the brow of the hill, then sat down upon a heap of stones, and looked despairingly after it.

Meantime Lucy put her head in her hands and blushed, though she was all alone. "How dare he forget the distance between us? Poor fellow! have not I at times forgotten it? I am worse than he. I lost my self-possession; I should have checked his folly; he knows nothing of les convenances. He has hurt my hand, he is so rough; I feel his clutch now; there, I thought so, it is all red—poor fellow! Nonsense! he is a sailor; he knows nothing of the world and its customs. Parting with a pleasant acquaintance forever made him a little sad.

"He is all nature; he is like nobody else; he shows every feeling instead of concealing it, that is all. He has gone home, I hope." She glanced hastily back. He was sitting on the stones, his arms drooping, his head bowed, a picture of despondency. She put her face in her hands again and pondered, blushing higher and higher. Then the pale face that had always been ruddy before, the simple grief and agitation, the manly eye that did not know how to weep, but was so clouded and troubled, and wildly sad; the shaking hands, that had clutched hers like a drowning man's (she felt them still), the quivering features, choked voice, and trembling lip, all these recoiled with double force upon her mind: they touched her far more than sobs and tears would have done, her sex's ready signs of shallow grief.

Two tears stole down her cheeks.

"If he would but go home and forget me!" She glanced hastily back. David was climbing up a tree, active as a cat. "He is like nobody else—he! he! Stay! is that to see the last of me—the very last? Poor soul! Madman, how will this end? What can come of it but misery to him, remorse to me?

"This is love." She half closed her eyes and smiled, repeating, "This is love.

"Oh how I despise all the others and their feeble flatteries!"

"Heaven forgive me my mad, my wicked wish!

"I am beloved.

"I am adored.

"I am miserable!"

As soon as the carriage was out of sight, David came down and hurried from the place. He found the pony at the inn. The ostler had not even removed his saddle.

"Methought that ostler did protest too much."

David kissed the saddle and the pommels, and the bridle her hand had held, and led the pony out. After walking a mile or two he mounted the pony, to sit in her seat, not for ease. Walking thirty miles was nothing to this athlete; sticking on and holding on with his chin on his knee was rather fatiguing.

Meantime, Eve walked on till she was four miles from home. No David. She sat down and cried a little space, then on again. She had just reached an angle in the road, when—clatter, clatter—David came cantering around with his knee in his mouth. Eve gave a joyful scream, and up went both her hands with sudden delight. At the double shock to his senses the pony thought his end was come, and perhaps the world's. He shied slap into the hedge and stuck there—alone; for, his rider swaying violently the reverse way, the girths burst, the saddle peeled off the pony's back, and David sat griping the pommel of the saddle in the middle of the road at Eve's feet, looking up in her face with an uneasy grin, while dust rose around him in a little column. Eve screeched, and screeched, and screeched; then fell to, with a face as red as a turkey-cock's, and beat David furiously, and hurt—her little hands.

David laughed. This incident did him good—shook him up a bit. The pony groveled out of the ditch and cantered home, squeaking at intervals and throwing his heels.

David got up, hoisted the side saddle on to his square shoulders, and, keeping it there by holding the girths, walked with Eve toward Font Abbey. She was now a little ashamed of her apprehensions; and, besides, when she leathered David, she was, in her own mind, serving him out for both frights. At all events, she did not scold him, but kindly inquired his adventures, and he told her what he had done and said, and what Miss Fountain had said.

The account disappointed Eve. "All this is just a pack of nothing," said she. "It is two lovers parting, or it is two common friendly acquaintances; all depends on how it was done, and that you don't tell me." Then she put several subtle questions as to the looks, and tones and manner of the young lady. David could not answer them. On this she informed him he was a fool.

"So I begin to think," said he.

"There! be quiet," said she, "and let me think it over."

"Ay! ay!" said he.

While he was being quiet and letting her think a carriage came rapidly up behind them, with a horseman riding beside it; and, as the pedestrians drew aside, an ironical voice fell upon them, and the carriage and horseman stopped, and floured, them with dust.

Messrs. Talboys and Fountain took a stroll to look at the new jail that was building in Royston, and, as they returned, Talboys, whose wounded pride had now fermented, told Mr. Fountain plainly that he saw nothing for it but to withdraw his pretensions to Miss Fountain.

"My own feelings are not sufficiently engaged for me to play the up-hill game of overcoming her disinclination."

"Disinclination? The mere shyness of a modest girl. If she was to be 'won unsought,' she would not be worthy to be Mrs. Talboys."

"Her worth is indisputable," said Mr. Talboys, "but that is no reason why I should force upon her my humble claims."

The moment his friend's pride began to ape humility, Fountain saw the wound it had received was incurable. He sighed and was silent. Opposition would only have set fire to opposition.

They went home together in silence. On the road Talboys caught sight of a tall gentleman carrying a side-saddle, and a little lady walking beside him. He recognized his bete noir with a grim smile. Here at least was one he had defeated and banished from the fair. What on earth was the man doing? Oh, he had been giving his sister a ride on a donkey, and they had met with an accident. Mr. Talboys was in a humor for revenge, so he pulled up, and in a somewhat bantering voice inquired where was the steed.

"Oh, he is in port by now," said David.

"Do you usually ease the animal of that part of his burden, sir?"

"No," said David, sullenly.

Eve, who hated Mr. Talboys, and saw through his sneers, bit her lip and colored, but kept silence.

But Mr. Talboys, unwarned by her flashing eye, proceeded with his ironical interrogatory, and then it was that Eve, reflecting that both these gentlemen had done their worst against David, and that henceforth the battlefield could never again be Font Abbey, decided for revenge. She stepped forward like an airy sylph, between David and his persecutor, and said, with a charming smile, "I will explain, sir."

Mr. Talboys bowed and smiled.

"The reason my brother carries this side-saddle is that it belongs to a charming young lady—you have some little acquaintance with her—Miss Fountain."

"Miss Fountain!" cried Talboys, in a tone from which all the irony was driven out by Eve's coup.

"She begged David to ride her pony home; she would not trust him to anybody else."

"Oh!" said Talboys, stupefied.

"Well, sir, owing to—to—an accident, the saddle came off, and the pony ran home; so then David had only her saddle to take care of for her."

"Why, we escorted Miss Fountain to Royston, and we never saw Mr. Dodd."

"Ay, but you did not go beyond Royston," said Eve, with a cunning air.

"Beyond Royston? where? and what was he doing there? Did he go all that way to take her orders about her pony?" said Talboys, bitterly.

"Oh, as to that you must excuse me, sir," cried Eve, with a scornful laugh; "that is being too inquisitive. Good-morning"; and she carried David off in triumph.

The next moment Mr. Talboys spurred on, followed by the phaeton. Talboys' face was yellow.

"La langue d'une femme est son epee."

"Sheer off and repair damages, you lubber," said David, dryly, "and don't come under our guns again, or we shall blow you out of the water. Hum! Eve, wasn't your tongue a little too long for your teeth just now?"

"Not an inch."

"She might be vexed; it is not for me to boast of her kindness."

"Temper won't let a body see everything. I'll tell you what I have done, too—I've declared war."

"Have you? Then run the Jack up to the mizzen-top, and let us fight it out."

"That is the way to look at it, David. Now don't you speak to me till we get home; let me think."

At the gate of Font Abbey, they parted, and Eve went home. David came to the stable yard and hailed, "Stable ahoy!" Out ran a little bandy-legged groom. "The craft has gone adrift," cried David, "but I've got the gear safe. Stow it away"; and as he spoke he chucked the saddle a distance of some six yards on to the bandy-legged groom, who instantly staggered back and sank on a little dunghill, and there sat, saddled, with two eyes like saucers, looking stupefied surprise between the pommels.

"It is you for capsizing in a calm," remarked David, with some surprise, and went his way.

"Well, Eve, have you thought?"

"Yes, David, I was a little hasty; that puppy would provoke a saint. After all there is no harm done; they can't hurt us much now. It is not here the game will be played out. Now tell me, when does your ship sail?"

"It wants just five weeks to a day."

"Does she take up her passengers at —— as usual?"

"Yes, Eve, yes."

"And Mrs. Bazalgette lives within a mile or two of ——. You have a good excuse for accepting her invitation. Stay your last week in her house. There will be no Talboys to come between you. Do all a man can do to win her in that week."

"I will."

"And if she says 'No,' be man enough to tear her out of your heart."

"I can't tear her out of my heart, but I will win her. I must win her. I can't live without her. A month to wait!"

Mr. Talboys. "Well, sir, what do you say now?"

Mr. Fountain (hypocritically). "I say that your sagacity was superior to mine; forgive me if I have brought you into a mortifying collision. To be defeated by a merchant sailor!" He paused to see the effect of his poisoned shaft.

Talboys. "But I am not defeated. I will not be defeated. It is no longer a personal question. For your sake, for her sake, I must save her from a degrading connection. I will accompany you to Mrs. Bazalgette's. When shall we go?"

"Well, not immediately; it would look so odd. The old one would smell a rat directly. Suppose we say in a month's time."

"Very well; I shall have a clear stage."

"Yes, and I shall then use all my influence with her. Hitherto I have used none."

"Thank you. Mr. Dodd cannot penetrate there, I conclude."

"Of course not."

"Then she will be Mrs. Talboys."

"Of course she will."

Lucy sighed a little over David's ardent, despairing passion, and his pale and drawn face. Her woman's instinct enabled her to comprehend in part a passion she was at this period of her life incapable of feeling, and she pitied him. He was the first of her admirers she had ever pitied. She sighed a little, then fretted a little, then reproached herself vaguely. "I must have been guilty of some imprudence—given some encouragement. Have I failed in womanly reserve, or is it all his fault? He is a sailor. Sailors are like nobody else. He is so simple-minded. He sees, no doubt, that he is my superior in all sterling qualities, and that makes him forget the social distance between him and me. And yet why suspect him of audacity? Poor fellow, he had not the courage to say anything to me, after all. No; he will go to sea, and forget his folly before he comes back." Then she had a gust of egotism. It was nice to be loved ardently and by a hero, even though that hero was not a gentleman of distinction, scarcely a gentleman at all. The next moment she blushed at her own vanity. Next she was seized with a sense of the great indelicacy and unpardonable impropriety of letting her mind run at all upon a person of the other sex; and shaking her lovely shoulders, as much as to say, "Away idle thoughts," she nestled and fitted with marvelous suppleness into a corner of the carriage, and sank into a sweet sleep, with a red cheek, two wet eyelashes, and a half-smile of the most heavenly character imaginable. And so she glided along till, at five in the afternoon, the carriage turned in at Mr. Bazalgette's gates. Lucy lifted her eyes, and there was quite a little group standing on the steps to receive her, and waving welcome to the universal pet. There was Mr. Bazalgette, Mrs. Bazalgette, and two servants, and a little in the rear a tall stranger of gentleman-like appearance.

The two ladies embraced one another so rapidly yet so smoothly, and so dovetailed and blended, that they might be said to flow together, and make one in all but color, like the Saone and the Rhone. After half a dozen kisses given and returned with a spirit and rapidity from which, if we male spectators of these ardent encounters were wise, we might slyly learn a lesson, Aunt Bazalgette suddenly darted her mouth at Lucy's ear, and whispered a few words with an animation that struck everybody present. Lucy smiled in reply. After "the meeting of the muslins," Mr. Bazalgette shook hands warmly, and at last Lucy was introduced to his friend Mr. Hardie, who expressed in courteous terms his hopes that her journey had been a pleasant one.

The animated words Mrs. Bazalgette whispered into Lucy's ear at that moment of burning affection were as follows:

"You have had it washed!"

Lucy (unpacking her things in her bedroom). "Who is Mr. Hardie, dear?"

"What! don't you know? Mr. Hardie is the great banker."

"Only a banker? I should have taken him for something far more distinguished. His manner is good. There is a suavity without feebleness or smallness."

Mrs. Bazalgette's eye flashed, but she answered with apparent nonchalance: "I am glad you like him; you will take him off my hands now and then. He must not be neglected; Bazalgette would murder us. Apropos, remind me to ask him to tell you Mr. Hardie's story, and how he comes to be looked up to like a prince in this part of the world, though he is only a banker, with only ten thousand a year."

"You make me quite curious, aunt. Cannot you tell me?"

"Me? Oh, dear, no! Paper currency, foreign loans, government securities, gold mines, ten per cents, Mr. Peel, and why one breaks and another doesn't! all that is quite beyond me. Bazalgette is your man. I had no idea your mousseline-delame would have washed so well. Why, it looks just out of the shop; it—" Come away, reader, for Heaven's sake!



CHAPTER XI.

THE man whom Mr. Bazalgette introduced so smoothly and off-hand to Lucy Fountain exercised a terrible influence over her life, as you will see by and by. This alone would make it proper to lay his antecedents before the reader. But he has independent claims to this notice, for he is a principal figure in my work. The history of this remarkable man's fortune is a study. The progress of his mind is another, and its past as well as its future are the very corner-stone of that capacious story which I am now building brick by brick, after my fashion where the theme is large. I invite my reader, therefore, to resist the natural repugnance which delicate minds feel to the ring of the precious metals, and for the sake of the coming story to accompany me into

AN OLD BANK.

The Hardies were goldsmiths in the seventeenth century; and when that business split, and the deposit and bill-of-exchange business went one way, and the plate and jewels another, they became bankers from father to son. A peculiarity attended them; they never broke, nor even cracked. Jew James Hardie conducted for many years a smooth, unostentatious and lucrative business. It professed to be a bank of deposit only, and not of discount. This was not strictly true. There never was a bank in creation that did not discount under the rose, when the paper represented commercial effects, and the indorsers were customers and favorites. But Mr. Hardie's main business was in deposits bearing no interest. It was of that nature known as "the legitimate banking business," a title not, I think, invented by the customers, since it is a system destitute of that reciprocity which is the soul of all just and legitimate commercial relations.

You shall lend me your money gratis, and I will lend it out at interest: such is legitimate banking—in the opinion of bankers.

This system, whose decay we have seen, and whose death my young readers are like to see, flourished under old Hardie, green—as the public in whose pockets its roots were buried.

Country gentlemen and noblemen, and tradesmen well-to-do, left floating balances varying from seven, five, three thousand pounds, down to a hundred or two, in his hands. His art consisted in keeping his countenance, receiving them with the air of a person conferring a favor, and investing the bulk of them in government securities, which in that day returned four and five per cent. As he did not pay one shilling for the use of the capital, he pocketed the whole interest. A small part of the aggregate balance was not invested, but remained in the bank coffers as a reserve to meet any accidental drain. It was a point of honor with the squires and rectors, who shared their incomes with him in a grateful spirit, never to draw their balances down too low; and more than once in this banker's career a gentleman has actually borrowed money for a month or two of the bank at four per cent, rather than exhaust his deposit, or, in other words, paid his debtor interest for the temporary use of his own everlasting property. Such capitalists are not to be found in our day; they may reappear at the Millennium.

The banker had three clerks; one a youth and very subordinate, the other two steady old men, at good salaries, who knew the affairs of the bank, but did not chatter them out of doors, because they were allowed to talk about them to their employer; and this was a vent. The tongue must have a regular vent or random explosions—choose! Besides the above compliment paid to years of probity and experience, the ancient regime bound these men to the interest and person of their chief by other simple customs now no more.

At each of the four great festivals of the Church they dined with Mr. and Mrs. Hardie, and were feasted and cordially addressed as equals, though they could not be got to reply in quite the same tone. They were never scorned, but a peculiar warmth of esteem and friendship was shown them on these occasions. One reason was, the old-fangled banker himself aspired to no higher character than that of a man of business, and were not these clerks men of business good and true? his staff, not his menials?

And since I sneered just now at a vital simplicity, let me hasten to own that here, at least, it was wise, as well as just and worthy. Where men are forever handling heaps of money, it is prudent to fortify them doubly against temptation—with self-respect, and a sufficient salary.

It is one thing not to be led into temptation (accident on which half the virtue in the world depends), another to live in it and overcome it; and in a bank it is not the conscience only that is tempted, but the senses. Piles of glittering gold, amiable as Hesperian fruit; heaps of silver paper, that seem to whisper as they rustle, "Think how great we are, yet see how little; we are fifteen thousand pounds, yet we can go into your pocket; whip us up, and westward ho! If you have not the courage for that, at all events wet your finger; a dozen of us will stick to it. That pen in your hand has but to scratch that book there, and who will know? Besides, you can always put us back, you know."

Hundreds and thousands of men take a share in the country's public morality, legislate, build churches, and live and die respectable, who would be jail-birds sooner or later if their sole income was the pay of a banker's clerk, and their eyes, and hands, and souls rubbed daily against hundred-pound notes as his do. I tell you it is a temptation of forty-devil power.

Not without reason, then, did this ancient banker bestow some respect and friendship on those who, tempted daily, brought their hands pure, Christmas after Christmas, to their master's table. Not without reason did Mrs. Hardie pet them like princes at the great festivals, and always send them home in the carriage as persons their entertainers delighted to honor. Herein I suspect she looked also, woman-like, to their security; for they were always expected to be solemnly, not improperly, intoxicated by the end of supper; no wise fuddled, but muddled; for the graceful superstition of the day suspected severe sobriety at solemnities as churlish and ungracious.

The bank itself was small and grave, and a trifle dingy, and bustle there was none in it; but if the stream of business looked sluggish and narrow, it was deep and quietly incessant, and tended all one way—to enrich the proprietor without a farthing risked.

Old Hardie had sat there forty years with other people's money overflowing into his lap as it rolled deep and steady through that little counting-house, when there occurred, or rather recurred, a certain phenomenon, which comes, with some little change of features, in a certain cycle of commercial changes as regularly as the month of March in the year, or the neap-tides, or the harvest moon, but, strange to say, at each visit takes the country by surprise.



CHAPTER XII.

THE nation had passed through the years of exhaustion and depression that follow a long war; its health had returned, and its elastic vigor was already reviving, when two remarkable harvests in succession, and an increased trade with the American continent, raised it to prosperity. One sign of vigor, the roll of capital, was wanting; speculation was fast asleep. The government of the day seems to have observed this with regret. A writer of authority on the subject says that, to stir stagnant enterprise, they directed "the Bank of England to issue about four millions in advances to the state and in enlarged discounts." I give you the man's words; they doubtless carry a signification to you, though they are jargon in a fog to me. Some months later the government took a step upon very different motives, which incidentally had a powerful effect in loosening capital and setting it in agitation. They reduced to four per cent the Navy Five per Cents, a favorite national investment, which represented a capital of two hundred millions. Now, when men have got used to five per cent from a certain quarter, they cannot be content with four, particularly the small holders; so this reduction of the Navy Five per Cents unsettled several thousand capitalists, and disposed them to search for an investment. A flattering one offered itself in the nick of time. Considerable attention had been drawn of late to the mineral wealth of South America, and one or two mining companies existed, but languished in the hands of professed speculators. The public now broke like a sudden flood into these hitherto sluggish channels of enterprise, and up went the shares to a high premium.

Almost contemporaneously, numerous joint-stock companies were formed, and directed toward schemes of internal industry. The small capitalists that had sold out of the Navy Five per Cents threw themselves into them all, and being bona fide speculators, drew hundreds in their train. Adventure, however, was at first restrained in some degree by the state of the currency. It was low, and rested on a singularly sound basis. Mr. Peel's Currency Bill had been some months in operation; by its principal provision the Bank of England was compelled on and after a certain date to pay gold for its notes on demand. The bank, anticipating a consequent rush for gold, had collected vast quantities of sovereigns, the new coin; but the rush never came, for a mighty simple reason. Gold is convenient in small sums, but a burden and a nuisance in large ones. It betrays its presence and invites robbers; it is a bore to lug it about, and a fearful waste of golden time to count it. Men run upon gold only when they have reason to distrust paper. But Mr. Peel's Bill, instead of damaging Bank of England paper, solidified it, and gave the nation a just and novel confidence in it. Thus, then, the large hoard of gold, fourteen to twenty millions, that the caution of the bank directors had accumulated in their coffers, remained uncalled for. But so large an abstraction from the specie of the realm contracted the provincial circulation. The small business of the country moved in fetters, so low was the metal currency. The country bankers petitioned government for relief, and government, listening to representations that were no doubt supported by facts, and backed by other interests, tampered with the principle of Mr. Peel's Bill, and allowed the country bankers to issue 1 pound and 2 pound notes for eleven years to come.

To this step there were but six dissentients in the House of Commons, so little was its importance seen or its consequences foreseen. This piece of inconsistent legislation removed one restraint, irksome but salutary, from commercial enterprise at a moment when capital was showing some signs of a feverish agitation. Its immediate consequences were very encouraging to the legislator; the country bankers sowed the land broadcast with their small paper, and this, for the cause above adverted to, took pro tem. the place of gold, and was seldom cashed at all except where silver was wanted. On this enlargement of the currency the arms of the nation seemed freed, enterprise shot ahead unshackled, and unwonted energy and activity thrilled in the veins of the kingdom. The rise in the prices of all commodities which followed, inevitable consequence of every increase in the currency, whether real or fictitious, was in itself adverse to the working classes; but the vast and numerous enterprises that were undertaken, some in the country itself, some in foreign parts, to which English workmen were conveyed, raised the price of labor higher still in proportion; so no class was out of the sun.

Men's faces shone with excitement and hope. The dormant hordes of misers crept out of their napkins and sepulchral strong-boxes into the warm air of the golden time. The mason's chisel chirped all over the kingdom, and the shipbuilders'* hammers rang all round the coast; corn was plenty, money became a drug, labor wealth, and poverty and discontent vanished from the face of the land. Adventure seemed all wings, and no lumbering carcass to clog it. New joint-stock companies were started in crowds as larks rise and darken the air in winter;** hundreds came to nothing, but hundreds stood, and of these nearly all reached a premium, small in some cases, high in most, fabulous in some; and the ease with which the first calls for cash on the multitudinous shares were met argued the vast resources that had hitherto slumbered in the nation for want of promising investments suited to the variety of human likings and judgments. The mind can hardly conceive any species of earthly enterprise that was not fitted with a company, oftener with a dozen, and with fifty or sixty where the proposed road to metal was direct. Of these the mines of Mexico still kept the front rank, but not to the exclusion of European, Australian and African ore.

* Two hundred new vessels are said to have been laid on the stocks in one year.

** In two years 624 new companies were projected.

That masterpiece of fiction, "the Prospectus,"* diffused its gorgeous light far and near, lit up the dark mine, and showed the minerals shining and the jewels peeping; shone broad over the smiling fields, soon to be plowed, reaped, and mowed by machinery; and even illumined the depths of the sea, whence the buried treasures of ancient and modern times were about to be recovered by the Diving-bell Company.

* There is a little unlicked anonymuncule going scribbling about, whose creed seems to be that a little camel, to be known, must be examined and compared with other quadrupeds, but that the great arts can be judged out of the depths of a penny-a-liner's inner consciousness, and to be rated and ranked need not be compared inter se. Applying the microscope to the method of the novelist, but diverting the glass from the learned judge's method in Biography, the learned historian's method in History, and the daily chronicler's method in dressing res gestoe for a journal, this little addle-pate has jumped to a comparative estimate, not based on comparison, so that all his blindfold vituperation of a noble art is chimera, not reasoning; it is, in fact, a retrograde step in science and logic. This is to evade the Baconian method, humble and wise, and crawl back to the lazy and self-confident system of the ancients, that kept the world dark so many centuries. It is [Greek] versus Induction. "[Greek]," ladies, is "divination by means of an ass's skull." A pettifogger's skull, however, will serve the turn, provided that pettifogger has been bitten with an insane itch for scribbling about things so infinitely above his capacity as the fine arts. Avoid this sordid dreamer, and follow, in letters as in science, the Baconian method! Then you will find that all uninspired narratives are more or less inexact, and that one, and one only, Fiction proper, has the honesty to antidote its errors by professing inexactitude. You will find that the Historian, Biographer, Novelist, and Chronicler are all obliged to paint upon their data with colors the imagination alone can supply, and all do it—alive or dead. You will find that Fiction, as distinguished from neat mendacity, has not one form upon earth, but a dozen. You will find the most habitually, willfully, and inexcusably inaccurate, with the means of accuracy under its nose, that form of fiction called "anonymous criticism," political and literary; the most equivocating, perhaps, is the "imaginavit," better known at Lincoln's Inn as the "affidavit." In the article of exaggeration, the mildest and tamest are perhaps History and the Novel, the boldest and most sparkling is the Advertisement, but the grandest, ablest, most gorgeous and plausibly exaggerating is surely the grave commercial prospectus, drawn up and signed by potent, grave and reverend seniors, who fear God, worship Mammon, revere big wigs right or wrong, and never read romances.

One mine was announced with a "vein of ore as pure and solid as a tin flagon."

In another the prospectus offered mixed advantages. The ore lay in so romantic a situation, and so thick, that the eye could be regaled with a heavenly landscape, while the foot struck against neglected lumps of gold weighing from two pounds to fifty.

This put the Bolanos mine on its mettle, and it announced, "not mines, but mountains of silver." Here, then, men might chip metal instead of painfully digging it. With this, up went the shares till they reached 500 premium.

Tialpuxahua was done at 199 premium. Anglo Mexican 10 pounds paid, went to 158 pounds premium. United Mexican 10 " " , " 155 pounds " Columbian 10 " " , " 82 pounds "

But the Real del Monte, a mine of longer standing, on which 70 pounds was paid up, went to 550 premium, and at a later period, for I am not following the actual sequence of events, reached the enormous height of 1350 premium.

The Prospectus of the Equitable Loan Company lamented in paragraph one the imposition practiced on the poor, and denounced the pawnbrokers' 15 per cent. In paragraph four it promised 40 per cent to its shareholders.

Philanthropy smiled in the heading, and Avarice stung in the tail. No wonder a royal duke and other good names figured in this concern. Another eloquent sheet appealed to the national dignity. Should a nation that was just now being intersected by forty canal companies, and lighted by thirty gas companies, and every life in it worth a button insured by a score of insurance companies, dwell in hovels? Here was a country that, after long ruling the sea, was now mining the earth, and employing her spoils nobly, lending money to every nation and tribe that would fight for constitutional liberty. Should the principal city of so sovereign a nation be a collection of dingy dwellings made with burned clay? No; let these perishable and ignoble, materials give way, and London be granite, or at least wear a granite front—with which up went the Red Granite Company.

A railway was projected from Dover to Calais, but the shares never came into the market.

The Rhine Navigation shares were snapped up directly. The original holders, having no faith in their own paper, sold large quantities directly for the account. But they had underrated the ardor of the public. At settling day the shares were at 28 premium, and the sellers found they had made a most original hedge; for "the hedge" is not a daring operation that grasps at large gains; it is a timid and cautious maneuver, whose humble aim is to lower the figures of possible loss or gain. To be ruined by a stroke of caution so shocked the directors' sense of justice that they forged new coupons in imitation of the old, and tried to pass them off. The fraud was discovered; a committee sat on it. Respectables quaked. Finally, a scapegoat was put forward and expelled the Stock Exchange, and with that the inquiry was hushed. It would have let too much daylight in on a host of "good names" in the City and on 'Change.

At the same time, the country threw itself with ardor into Transatlantic loans. This, however, was an existing speculation vastly dilated at the period we are treating, but created about five years earlier. Its antecedent history can be dispatched in a few words.

England is said to be governed by a limited monarchy; but in case of a struggle between the two, her heart goes more with unlimited republic than with genuine monarchy. The Spanish colonies in South America found this out, and in their long battle for independence came to us for sympathy and cash. They often obtained both, and in one case something more; we lent Chili a million at six per cent, but we lent her ships, bayonets, and Cochrane gratis. This last, a gallant and amphibious dragoon, went to work in a style the slow Spaniard was unprepared for; blockaded the coast, overawed the Royalist party, and wrenched the state from the mother country, and settled it a republic. One of the first public acts of this Chilian republic was to borrow a million of us to go on with. Peru took only half a million at this period. Colombia, during the protracted struggle her independence cost her, obtained a sort of carte blanche loan from us at ten per cent. We were to deliver the stock in munitions of war, as called for, which, you will 'observe, was selling our loan; for at the bottom of all our romance lies business, business, business. Her freedom secured, the new state accommodated us by taking two millions of 5 per cent stock at 84. In all, about ten millions nominal capital, eight millions cash, crossed the Atlantic while we were cool; but now that we were heated by three hundred joint-stock companies, and the fire fanned by seven hundred prospectuses, fresh loans were effected with a wider range of territory and on a more important scale.

Brazil now got . . . 3,200,000 l. in two loans; Colombia . . . . . . 4,750,000 l.; Peru . . . . . . . . 1,366,000 l. in two loans; Mexico . . . . . . . 6,400,000 l. in two loans; Buenos Ayres . . . . 1,000,000 l.;

and Guatemala, a state we never heard of till she wanted money, took a million and a half. Besides these there were smaller loans, lent, not to nations, but to tribes. So hot was our money in our pockets that we tried 200,000 pounds on Patagonia. But the savages could not be got to nail us, which was the more to be regretted, as we might have done a good stroke with them; could have sent the stock out in fisherman's boots, cocked hats, beads, Bibles, and army misfits.

Europe found out there existed an island overflowing with faith and overburdened with money; she ran at us for a slice of the latter. We lent Naples two millions and a half at 5 per cent stock 92 1/2. Portugal a million and a half at 87. Austria three millions and a half at 82 1/2. Denmark three millions and a half at 3 per cent stock 75 1/2. Then came a bonne bouche. The subtle Greek had gathered from his western visitors a notion of the contents of Thucydides, and he came to us for sympathy and money to help him shake off the barbarians and their yoke, and save the wreck of the ancient temples. The appeal was shrewdly planned. England reads Thucydides, and skims Demosthenes, though Greece, it is presumed, does not. The impressions of our boyhood fasten upon our hearts, and our mature reason judges them like a father, not like a judge. To sweep the Tartar out of the Peloponnese, and put in his place a free press that should recall from the tomb that soul of freedom, and revive by degrees that tongue of music—who can play Solomon when such a proposal comes up for judgment?

"Give yourself no further concern about the matter," said the lofty Burdett, with a gentlemanlike wave of the hand; "your country shall be saved."

"In a few weeks," said another statesman, "Cochrane will be at Constantinople, and burn the port and its vessels. Having thus disarmed invasion, he will land in the Morea and clear it of the Turks."

Greece borrowed in two loans 2,800,000 pounds at 5 per cent. Russia (droll juxtaposition!) drew up the rear. She borrowed three millions and a half, but upon far more favorable terms than, with all our romance, we accorded to "Graeculus esuriens." The Greek stock ruled * from 56 1/2 to 59.

* A corruption from the French verb "rouler."

Into these loans, and the multitudinous mines and miscellaneous enterprises, gas, railroad, canal, steam, dock, provision, insurance, milk, water, building, washing, money-lending, fishing, lottery, annuities, herring-curing, poppy-oil, cattle, weaving, bog draining, street-cleaning, house-roofing, old clothes exporting, steel-making, starch, silk-worm, etc., etc., etc., companies, all classes of the community threw themselves, either for investment or temporary speculation, on the fluctuations of the share-market. One venture was ennobled by a prince of the blood figuring as a director; another was sanctified by an archbishop; hundreds were solidified by the best mercantile names in the cities of London, Liverpool, and Manchester. Princes, dukes, duchesses, stags, footmen, poets, philosophers, divines, lawyers, physicians, maids, wives, widows, tore into the market, and choked the Exchange up so tight that the brokers could not get in nor out, and a bare passage had to be cleared by force and fines through a mass of velvet, fustian, plush, silk, rags, lace, and broadcloth, that jostled and squeezed each other in the struggle for gain. The shop-keeper flung down his scales and off to the share-market; the merchant embarked his funds and his credit; the clerk risked his place and his humble respectability. High and low, rich and poor, all hurried round the Exchange, like midges round a flaring gas-light, and all were to be rich in a day.

And, strange to say, all seemed to win and none to lose; for nothing was at a discount except toil and self-denial, and the patient industry that makes men rich, but not in a day.

One cold misgiving fell. The vast quantities of gold and silver that Mexico, mined by English capital and machinery, was about to pour into our ports, would so lower the price of those metals that a heavy loss must fall on all who held them on a considerable scale at their present values in relation to corn, land, labor and other properties and commodities.

"We must convert our gold," was the cry. Others more rash said: "This is premature caution—timidity. There is no gold come over yet; wait till you learn the actual bulk of the first metallic imports." "No, thank you," replied the prudent ones, "it will be too late then; when once they have touched our shores, the fall will be rapid." So they turned their gold, whose value was so precarious, into that unfluctuating material, paper. This solitary fear was soon swallowed up in the general confidence. The king congratulated Parliament, and Parliament the king. Both houses rang with trumpet notes of triumph, a few of which still linger in the memories of living men.

1. "The cotton trade and iron trade were never so flourishing."

2. "The exports surpassed by millions the highest figure recorded in' history."

3. "The hum of industry was heard throughout the fields."

4. "Joy beamed in every face."

5. "The country now reaped in honor and repose all it had sown in courage, constancy and wisdom."

6. "Our prosperity extended to all ranks of men, enhanced by those arts which minister to human comfort, and those inventions by which man seems to have obtained a mastery over Nature through the application of her own powers."

But one honorable gentleman informed the Commons that "distress had vanished from the land,"* and in addressing the throne acknowledged a novel embarrassment: "Such," said he, "is the general prosperity of the country, that I feel at a loss how to proceed; whether to give precedence to our agriculture, which is the main support of the country, to our manufactures, which have increased to an unexampled extent, or to our commerce, which distributes them to the ends of the earth, finds daily new outlets for their distribution, and new sources of national wealth and prosperity."

* "The poor ye shall have always with you."—Chimerical Evangelist.

Our old bank did not profit by the golden shower. Mr. Hardie was old, too, and the cautious and steady habits of forty years were not to be shaken readily. He declined shares, refused innumerable discounts, and loans upon scrip and invoices, and, in short, was behind the time. His bank came to be denounced as a clog on commerce. Two new banks were set up in the town to oil the wheels of adventure, on which he was a drag, and Hardie fell out of the game.

He was not so old or cold as to be beyond the reach of mortification, and these things stung him. One day he said fretfully to old Skinner, "It is hardly worth our while to take down the shutters now, for anything we do."

One afternoon two of his best customers, who were now up to their chins in shares, came and solicited a heavy loan on their joint personal security. Hardie declined. The gentlemen went out. Young Skinner watched them, and told his father they went into the new bank, stayed there a considerable time, and came out looking joyous. Old Skinner told Mr. Hardie. The old gentleman began at last to doubt himself and his system.

"The bank would last my time," said he, "but I must think of my son. I have seen many a good business die out because the merchant could not keep up with the times; and here they are inviting me to be director in two of their companies—good mercantile names below me. It is very flattering. I'll write to Dick. It is just he should have a voice; but, dear heart! at his age we know beforehand he will be for galloping faster than the rest. Well, his old father is alive to curb him."

It was always the ambition of Mr. Richard Hardie to be an accomplished financier. For some years past he had studied money at home and abroad—scientifically. His father's connection had gained him a footing in several large establishments abroad, and there he sat and worked en amateur as hard as a clerk. This zeal and diligence in a young man of independent means soon established him in the confidence of the chiefs, who told him many a secret. He was now in a great London bank, pursuing similar studies, practical and theoretical.

He received his father's letters sketching the rapid decline of the bank, and finally a short missive inviting him down to consider an enlarged plan of business. During the four days that preceded the young man's visit, more than one application came to Hardie senior for advances on scrip, cargoes coming from Mexico, and joint personal securities of good merchants that were in the current ventures. Old Hardie now, instead of refusing, detained the proposals for consideration. Meantime, he ordered five journals daily instead of one, sought information from every quarter, and looked into passing events with a favorable eye. The result was that he blamed himself, and called his past caution timidity. Mr. Richard Hardie arrived and was ushered into the bank parlor. After the first affectionate greetings old Skinner was called in, and, in a little pompous, good-hearted speech, invited to make one in a solemn conference. The compliment brought the tears into the old man's eyes. Mr. Hardie senior opened, showed by the books the rapid decline of business, pointed to the rise of two new banks owing to the tight hand he had held unseasonably, then invited the other two to say whether an enlarged system was not necessary to meet the times, and submitted the last, proposals for loans and discounts. "Now, sir, let me have your judgment."

"After my betters, sir," was old Skinner's reply.

"Well, Dick, have you formed any opinion on this matter?"

"I have, sir."

"I am extremely glad of it," said the old gentleman, very sincerely, but with a shade of surprise; "out with it, Dick."

The young man thus addressed by his father would not have conveyed to us the idea of "Dick." His hair was brown; there were no wrinkles under his eyes or lines in his cheek, but in his manner there was no youth whatever. He was tall, commanding, grave, quiet, cold, and even at that age almost majestic. His first sentence, slow and firm, removed the paternal notion that a cipher or a juvenile had come to the council-table.

"First, sir, let me return to you my filial thanks for that caution which you seem to think has been excessive. There I beg respectfully to differ with you."

"I am glad of it, Dick; but now you see it is time to relax, eh?"

"No, sir."

The two old men stared at one another. The senile youth proceeded: "That some day or other our system will have to be relaxed is probable, but just now all it wants is—tightening."

"Why, Dick? Skinner, the boy is mad. You can't have watched the signs of the times."

"I have, sir; and looked below the varnish."

"To the point, then, Dick. There is a general proposal 'to relax our system.' The boy uses good words, Skinner, don't he? and here are six particulars over which you can cast your eye. Hand them to him, Skinner."

"I will take things in that order," said Richard, quietly running his eye over the papers. There was a moment's silence. "It is proposed to connect the bank with the speculations of the day."

"That is not fairly stated, Dick; it is too broad. We shall make a selection; we won't go in the stream above ankle deep."

"That is a resolution, sir, that has been often made but never kept—for this reason: you can't sit on dry land and calculate the force of the stream. It carries those who paddle in it off their feet, and then they must swim with it or—sink."

"Dick, for Heaven's sake, no poetry here."

"Nay, sir," said old Skinner, "remember, 'twas you brought the stream in."

"More fool I. 'Flow on, thou shining Dick'; only the more figures of arithmetic, and the fewer figures of speech, you can give old Skinner and me, the more weight you will carry with us."

The young man colored a moment, but never lost his ponderous calmness.

"I will give you figures in their turn, But we were to begin with the general view. Half-measures, then, are no measures; they imply a vacillating judgment; they are a vain attempt to make a pound of rashness and a pound of timidity into two pounds of prudence. You permit me that figure, sir; it comes from the summing-book. The able man of business fidgets. He keeps quiet, or carries something out."

Old Skinner rubbed his hands. "These are wise words, sir."

"No, only clever ones. This is book-learning. It is the sort of wisdom you and I have outgrown these forty years. Why, at his age I was choke-full of maxims. They are good things to read; but act proverbs, and into the Gazette you go. My faith in any general position has melted away with the snow of my seventy winters."

"What, then, if it was established that all adders bite, would you refuse to believe his adder would bite you, sir?"

"Dick, if a single adder bit me, it would go farther to convince me that the next adder would bite me too than if fifty young Buffons told me all adders bite."

The senile youth was disconcerted for a single moment. He hesitated. The keys that the old man had himself said would unlock his judgment lay beside him on the table. He could not help glancing slyly at them, but he would not use them before their turn. His mind was methodical. His will was strong in all things. He put his hand in his side-pocket, and drew out a quantity of papers neatly arranged, tied, and indorsed.

The old men instantly bestowed a more watchful sort of attention on him.

"This, gentlemen, is a list of the joint-stock companies created last year. What do you suppose is their number?"

"Fifty, I'll be bound, Mr. Richard."

"More than that, Skinner. Say eighty."

"Two hundred and forty-three, gentlemen. Of these some were stillborn, but the majority hold the market. The capital proposed to be subscribed on the sum total is two hundred and forty-eight millions."

"Pheugh! Skinner!"

"The amount actually paid at present (chiefly in bank-notes) is stated at 43,062,608 pounds, and the balance due at the end of the year on this set of ventures will be 204,937,392 pounds or thereabouts. The projects of this year have not been collected, but they are on a similar scale. Full a third of the general sum total is destined to foreign countries, either in loans or to work mines, etc., the return for which is uncertain and future. All these must come to nothing, and ruin the shareholders that way, or else must sooner or later be paid in specie, since no foreign nation can use our paper, but must sell it to the Bank of England. We stand, then, pledged to burst like a bladder, or to export in a few months thrice as much specie as we possess. To sum up, if the country could be sold to-morrow, with every brick that stands upon it, the proceeds would not meet the engagements into which these joint-stock companies have inveigled her in the course of twenty months. Viewed then, in gross, under the test, not of poetry and prospectus, but of arithmetic, the whole thing is a bubble."

"A bubble?" uttered both the seniors in one breath, and almost in a scream.

"But I am ready to test it in detail. Let us take three main features—the share-market, the foreign loans, and the inflated circulation caused by the provincial banks. Why do the public run after shares? Is it in the exercise of a healthy judgment? No; a cunning bait has been laid for human weakness. Transferable shares valued at 100 pounds can be secured and paid for by small instalments of 5 pounds or less. If, then, his 100 pound shares rise to 130 pounds each, the adventurer can sell at a nominal profit of 30 per cent, but a real profit of 600 per cent on his actual investment. This intoxicates rich and poor alike. It enables the small capitalist to operate on the scale that belongs, in healthy times, to the large capitalist; a beggar can now gamble like a prince; his farthings are accepted as counters for sovereigns; but this is a distinct feature of all the more gigantic bubbles recorded. Here, too, you see, is illusory credit on a vast scale, with its sure consequence, inflated and fictitious values; another bit of soap that goes to every bubble in history. Now for the Transatlantic loans. I submit them to a simple test. Judge nations like individuals. If you knew nothing of a man but that he had set up a new shop, would you lend him money? Then why lend money to new republics of whom you know nothing but that, born yesterday, they may die to-morrow, and that they are exhausted by recent wars, and that, where responsibility is divided, conscience is always subdivided?"

"Well said, Richard, well said."

"If a stranger offered you thirty per cent, would you lend him your money?"

"No; for I should know he didn't mean to pay."

"Well, these foreign negotiators offer nominally five per cent, but, looking at the price of the stock, thirty, forty, and even fifty per cent. Yet they are not so liberal as they appear; they could afford ninety per cent. You understand me, gentlemen. Would you lend to a man that came to you under an alias like a Newgate thief? Cast your eye over this prospectus. It is the Poyais loan. There is no such place as Poyais."

"Good heavens!"

"It is a loan to an anonymous swamp by the Mosquito River. But Mosquito suggests a bite. So the vagabonds that brought the proposal over put their heads together as they crossed the Atlantic, and christened the place Poyais; and now fools that are not fools enough to lend sixpence to Zahara, are going to lend 200,000 pounds to rushes and reeds."

"Why, Richard, what are you talking about? 'The air is soft and balmy; the climate fructifying; the soil is spontaneous'—what does that mean? mum! mum! 'The water runs over sands of gold.' Why, it is a description of Paradise. And, now I think of it, is not all this taken from John Milton?"

"Very likely. It is written by thieves."

"It seems there are tortoise-shell, diamonds, pearls—"

"In the prospectus, but not in the morass. It is a good, straightforward morass, with no pretensions but to great damp. But don't be alarmed, gentlemen, our countrymen's money will not be swamped there. It will all be sponged up in Threadneedle Street by the poetic swindlers whose names, or aliases, you hold in your hand. The Greek, Mexican, and Brazilian loans may be translated from Prospectish into English thus: At a date when every sovereign will be worth five to us in sustaining shriveling paper and collapsing credit, we are going to chuck a million sovereigns into the Hellespont, five million sovereigns into the Gulf of Mexico, and two millions into the Pacific Ocean. Against the loans to the old monarchies there is only this objection, that they are unreasonable; will drain out gold when gold will be life-blood; which brings me, by connection, to my third item—the provincial circulation. Pray, gentlemen, do you remember the year 1793?"

For some minutes past a dead silence and a deep, absorbed attention had received the young man's words; but that quiet question was like a great stone descending suddenly on a silent stream. Such a noise, agitation, and flutter. The old banker and his clerk both began to speak at once.

"Don't we?"

"Oh, Lord, Mr. Richard, don't talk of 1793."

"What do you know about 1793? You weren't born."

"Oh, Mr. Richard, such a to-do, sir! 1800 firms in the Gazette. Seventy banks stopped."

"Nearer a hundred, Mr. Skinner. Seventy-one stopped in the provinces, and a score in London."

"Why, sir, Mr. Richard knows everything, whether he was born or not."

"No, he doesn't, you old goose; he doesn't know how you and I sat looking at one another, and pretending to fumble, and counting out slowly, waiting sick at heart for the sack of guineas that was to come down by coach. If it had not come we should not have broken, but we should have suspended payment for twenty-four hours, and I was young enough then to have cut my throat in the interval."

"But it came, sir—it came, and you cried, 'Keep the bank open till midnight!' and when the blackguards heard that, and saw the sackful of gold, they crept away; they were afraid of offending us. Nobody came anigh us next day. Banks smashed all round us like glass bottles, but Hardie & Co. stood, and shall stand for ever and ever. Amen."

"Who showed the white feather, Mr. Skinner? Who came creeping and sniveling, and took my hand under the counter, and pressed it to give me courage, and then was absurd enough to make apologies, as if sympathy was as common as dirt? Give me your hand directly, you old—Hallo!"

"God bless you, sir! God bless you! It is all right, sir. The bank is safe for another fifty years. We have got Master Richard, and he has got a head. O Gemini, what a head he has got, and the other day playing marbles!"

"Yes, and we are interrupting him with our nonsense. Go on, Richard."

Richard had secretly but fully appreciated the folly of the interruption. His was a great mind, and moved in a sort of pecuniary ether high above the little weaknesses my reader has observed in Hardie senior and old Skinner. Being, however, equally above the other little infirmities of fretfulness and fussiness, he waited calmly and proceeded coolly.

"What was the cause of the distress in 1793?"

"Ah! that was the puzzle—wasn't it, Skinner? We were never so prosperous as that year. The distress came over us like a thunder-storm all in a moment. Nobody knows the exact cause."

"I beg your pardon, sir, it is as well known as any point of history whatever. Some years of prosperity had created a spawn of country banks, most of them resting on no basis; these had inflated the circulation with their paper. A panic and a collapse of this fictitious currency was as inevitable as the fall of a stone forced against nature into the air."

"There were a great many petty banks, Richard, and, of course, plenty of bad paper. I believe you are right. The causes of things were not studied in those days as they are now."

"All that we know now, sir, is to be found in books written long before 1793."

"Books! books!"

"Yes, sir; a book is not dead paper except to sleepy minds. A book is a man giving you his best thoughts in his very best words. It is only the shallow reader that can't learn life from genuine books. I'll back him who studies them against the man who skims his fellow-creatures, and vice versa. A single page of Adam Smith, studied, understood, and acted on by the statesmen of your day, would have averted the panic of 1793. I have the paragraph in my note-book. He was a great man, sir; oblige me, Mr. Skinner."

"Certainly, sir, certainly. 'Should the circulation of paper exceed the value of the gold and silver of which it supplies the place, many people would immediately perceive they had more of this paper than was necessary for transacting their business at home; and, as they could not send it abroad, bank paper only passing current where it is issued, there would be a run upon the banks to the extent of this superfluous paper.'"

Richard Hardie resumed. "We were never so overrun with rotten banks as now. Shoemakers, cheesemongers, grocers, write up 'Bank' over one of their windows, and deal their rotten paper by the foolscap ream. The issue of their larger notes is colossal, and renders a panic inevitable soon or late; but, to make it doubly sure, they have been allowed to utter 1 pound and 2 pound notes. They have done it, and on a frightful scale. Then, to make it trebly sure, the just balance between paper and specie is disturbed in the other scale as well as by foreign loans to be paid in gold. In 1793 the candle was left unsnufled, but we have lighted it at both ends and put it down to roast. Before the year ends, every sovereign in the banks of this country may be called on to cash 30 pounds of paper—bank-paper, share-paper, foolscap-paper, waste-paper. In 1793, a small excess of paper over specie had the power to cause a panic and break some ninety banks; but our excess of paper is far larger, and with that fatal error we have combined foreign loans and three hundred bubble companies. Here, then, meet three bubbles, each of which, unaided, secures a panic. Events revolve, gentlemen, and reappear at intervals. The great French bubble of 1719 is here to-day with the addition of two English tom-fooleries, foreign loans and 1 pound notes. Mr. Law was a great financier. Mr. Law was the first banker and the greatest. All mortal bankers are his pupils, though they don't know it. Mr. Law was not a fool; his critics are. Mr. Law did not commit one error out of six that are attributed to him by those who judge him without reading, far less studying, his written works. He was too sound and sober a banker to admit small notes. They were excluded from his system. He found France on the eve of bankruptcy; in fact, the state had committed acts of virtual bankruptcy. He saved her with his bank.

"Then came his two errors, one remedial, the other fatal. No. 1, he created a paper company and blew it up to a bubble. When the shares had reached the skies, they began to come down, like stones, by an inevitable law. No. 2, to save them from their coming fate, he propped them with his bank. Overrating the power of governments, and underrating Nature's, he married the Mississippi shares (at forty times their value) to his banknotes by edict. What was the consequence? The bank paper, sound in itself, became rotten by marriage. Nothing could save the share-paper. The bank paper, making common cause with it, shared its fate. Had John Law let his two tubs each stand on its own bottom, the shares would have gone back to what they came from—nothing; the bank, based as it was on specie, backed stoutly by the government, and respected by the people for great national services, would have weathered the storm and lasted to this day. But he tied his rickety child to his healthy child, and flung them into a stormy sea, and told them to swim together: they sank together. Now observe, sir, the fatal error that ruined the great financier in 1720 is this day proposed to us. We are to connect our bank with bubble companies by the double tie of loans and liability. John Law was sore tempted. The Mississippi Company was his own child as well as the bank. Love of that popularity he had drunk so deeply, egotism, and parental partiality, combined to obscure that great man's judgment. But, with us, folly stands naked on one side, bubbles in hand—common sense and printed experience on the other. These six specimen bubbles here are not our children. Let me see whose they are, aliases excepted."

"Very good, young gentleman, very good. Now it is my turn. I have got a word or two to say on the other side. The journals, which are so seldom agreed, are all of one mind about these glorious times. Account for that!"

"How can you know their minds, sir?"

"By their leading columns."

"Those are no clue."

"What! Do they think one thing and print another? Why should the independent press do that? Nonsense."

"Why, sir? Because they are bribed to print it, but they are not bribed to think it."

"Bribed? The English press bribed?"

"Oh, not directly, like the English freeman. Oblige me with a journal or two, no matter which; they are all tarred with the same stick in time of bubble. Here, sir, are 50 pounds worth of bubble advertisements, yielding a profit of say 25 pounds on this single issue. In this one are nearer 100 pounds worth of such advertisements. Now is it in nature that a newspaper, which is a trade speculation, should say the word that would blight its own harvest? This is the oblique road by which the English press is bribed. These leaders are mere echoes of to-day's advertisement sheet, and bidders for to-morrow's."

"The world gets worse every day, Skinner."

"It gets no better," replied Richard, philosophically.

"But, Richard, here is our county member, and ——, staid, sober men both, and both have pledged their honor on the floor of the House of Commons to the sound character of some of these companies."

"They have, sir; but they will never redeem the said honor, for they are known to be bribed, and not obliquely, by those very companies." (The price current of M. P. honor, in time of bubble, ought to be added to the works of arithmetic.) "Those two Brutuses get 500 pounds apiece per annum for touting those companies down at Stephen's. —— goes cheaper and more oblique. He touts, in the same place, for a gas company, and his house in the square flares from cellar to garret, gratis."

"Good gracious! and he talked of the light of conscience in his very last speech. But this cannot apply to all. There is the archbishop; he can't have sold his name to that company."

"Who knows? He is over head and ears in debt."

"But the duke, he can't have."

"Why not? He is over head and ears in debt. Princes deep in debt by misconduct, and bishops deep in ditto by ditto, are half-honest, needy men; and half-honest, needy men are all to be bought and sold like hogs in Smithfield, especially in time of bubble."

"What is the world come to!"

"What it was a hundred years ago."

"I have got one pill left for him, Skinner. Here is the Chancellor of the Exchequer, a man whose name stands for caution, has pronounced a panegyric on our situation. Here are his words quoted in this leader; now listen: 'We may safely venture to contemplate with instructive admiration the harmony of its proportions and the solidity of its basis.' What do you say to that?"

"I say it is one man's opinion versus the experience of a century. Besides, that is a quotation, and may be a fraudulent one."

"No, no. The speech was only delivered last Wednesday: we will refer to it. Mum! mum! Ah, here it is. 'The Chancellor of the Exchequer rose and—' mum! mum! ah—'I am of—o-pinion that—if, upon a fair review of our situation, there shall appear to be nothing hollow in its foundation, artificial in its superstructure, or flimsy in its general results, we may safely venture to contemplate with instructive admiration the harmony of its proportions and the solidity of its basis.'"

"Ha! ha! ha! I quite agree with cautious Bobby. If it is not hollow, it may be solid; if it is not a gigantic paper balloon, it may be a very fine globe, and vice versa, which vice versa he in his heart suspects to be the truth. You see, sir, the mangled quotation was a swindle, like the flimsy superstructures it was intended to prop. The genuine paragraph is a fair sample of Robinson, and of the art of withholding opinion by means of expression. But as quoted, by a fraudulent suppression of one half, the unbalanced half is palmed off as a whole, and an indecision perverted into a decision. I might just as fairly cite him as describing our situation to be 'hollow in its basis, artificial in its superstructure, flimsy in its general result.' Since you value names, I will cite you one man that has commented on the situation; not, like Mr. Robinson, by misty sentences, each neutralizing the other, but by consistent acts: a man, gentlemen, whose operations have always been numerous and courageous in less prosperous times, yet now he is out of everything but a single insurance company."

"Who is the gentleman?"

"It is not a gentleman; it is a blackguard," said the exact youth.

"You excite my curiosity. Who is the capitalist, then, that stands aloof?"

"Nathan Meyer Rothschild."

"The devil."

Old Skinner started sitting. "Rothschild hanging back. Oh, master, for Heavens sake don't let us try to be wiser than those devils of Jews. Mr. Richard, I bore up pretty well against your book-learning, but now you've hit me with a thunderbolt. Let us get in gold, and keep as snug as mice, and not lend one of them a farthing to save them from the gallows. Those Jews smell farther than a Christian can see. Don't let's have any more 1793's, sir, for Heaven's sake. Listen to Mr. Richard; he has been abroad, and come back with a head."

"Be quiet, Skinner. You seem to possess private information, Richard."

"I employ three myrmidons to hunt it; it will be useful by and by."

"It may be now. Remark on these proposals."

"Well, sir, two of them are based on gold mines, shares at a fabulous premium. Now no gold mine can be worked to a profit by a company. Primo: Gold is not found in veins like other metals. It is an abundant metal made scarce to man by distribution over a wide surface. The very phrase gold mine is delusive. Secundo: Gold is a metal that cannot be worked to a profit by a company for this reason: workmen will hunt it for others so long as the daily wages average higher than the amount of metal they find per diem; but, that Rubicon once passed, away they run to find gold for themselves in some spot with similar signs; if they stay, it is to murder your overseers and seize your mine. Gold digging is essentially an individual speculation. These shares sell at 700 pounds apiece; a dozen of them are not worth one Dutch tulip-root. Ah! here is a company of another class, in which you have been invited to be director; they would have given you shares and made you liable." Mr. Richard consulted his note-book. "This company, which 'commands the wealth of both Indies'—in perspective—dissolved yesterday afternoon for want of eight guineas. They had rented offices at eight guineas a week, and could not pay the first week. 'Turn out or pay,' said the landlord, a brute absorbed in the present, and with no faith in the glorious future. They offered him 1,500 pounds worth of shares instead of his paltry eight guineas cash. On this he swept his premises of them. What a godsend you would have been to these Jeremy Diddlers, you and the ten thousand they would have bled you of."

The old banker turned pale.

"Oh, that is nothing new, sir. 'To-morrow the first lord of the treasury calls at my house, and brings me 11,261 pounds 14s. 11 3/4d., which is due to me from the nation at twelve of the clock on that day; you couldn't lend me a shilling till then, could ye?' Now for the loans. Baynes upon Haggart want 2,000 pounds at 5 per cent."

"Good names, Richard, surely," said old Hardie, faintly.

"They were; but there are no good names in time of bubble. The operations are so enormous that in a few weeks a man is hollowed out and his frame left standing. In such times capitalists are like filberts; they look all nut, but half of them are dust inside the shell, and only known by breaking. Baynes upon Haggart, and Haggart upon Baynes, the city is full of their paper. I have brought some down to show it to you. A discounter, who is a friend of mine, did it for them on a considerable scale at thirty per cent discount (cast your eye over these bills, Haggart on Baynes). But he has burned his fingers even at that, and knows it. So I am authorized to offer all these to you at fifty per cent discount."

"Good heavens! Richard!"

"If, therefore, you think of doing rotten apple upon rotten pear, otherwise Haggart upon Baynes, why do it at five per cent when it is to be had by the quire at fifty?"

"Take them out of my sight," said old Hardie, starting up—"take them all out of my sight. Thank God I sent for you. No more discussion, no more doubt. Give me your hand, my son; you have saved the bank!"

The conference broke up with these eager words, and young Skinner retired swiftly from the keyhole.

The next day Mr. Hardie senior came to a resolution which saddened poor old Skinner. He called the clerks in and introduced them to Mr. Richard as his managing partner.

"Every dog has his day," said the old gentleman. "Mine has been a long one. Richard has saved the bank from a fatal error; Richard shall conduct it as Hardie & Son. Don't be disconsolate, Skinner; I'll look in on you now and then."

Hardie junior sent back all the proposals with a polite negative. He then proceeded on a two-headed plan. Not to lose a shilling when the panic he expected should come, and to make 20,000 pounds upon its subsiding. Hardie & Son held Exchequer bills on rather a large scale. They were at half a crown premium. He sold every one and put gold in his coffers. He converted in the same way all his other securities except consols. These were low, and he calculated they would rise in any general depreciation of more pretentious investments. He drew out his balance, a large one, from his London correspondent, and put his gold in his coffers. He drew a large deposit from the Bank of England. Whenever his own notes came into the bank, he withdrew them from circulation. "They may hop upon Hardie & Son," said he, "but they shan't run upon us, for I'll cut off their legs and keep them in my safe."

One day he invited several large tradesmen in the town to dine with him at the bank. They came full of curiosity. He gave them a luxurious dinner, which pleased them. After dinner he exposed the real state of the nation, as he understood it. They listened politely, and sneered silently, but visibly. He then produced six large packets of his banknotes; each packet contained 3,000 pounds. Skinner, then present, enveloped these packets in cartridge-paper, and the guests were requested to seal them up. This was soon done. In those days a bunch of gigantic seals dangled and danced on the pit of every man's stomach. The sealed packets went back into the safe.

"Show us a sparkle o' gold, Mr. Richard," said Meredith, linen-draper and wag.

"Mr. Skinner, oblige me by showing Mr. Meredith a little of your specie—a few anti-bubble pills, eh! Mr. Meredith."

Omnes. "Ha! ha! ha!"

Presently a shout from Meredith: "Boys, he has got it here by the bushel. All new sovereigns. Don't any of ye be a linen-draper, if you have got a chance to be a banker. How much is there here, Mr. Richard?"

"We must consult the books to ascertain that, sir."

"Must you? Then just turn your head away, Mr. Richard, and I'll put in a claw."

Omnes. "Haw! haw! ho!"

Richard Hardie resumed. "My precautions seem extravagant to you now, but in a few months you will remember this conversation, and it will lead to business." The rest of the evening he talked of anything, everything, except banking. He was not the man to dilute an impression.

Hardie junior was so confident in his reading and his reasonings that he looked every day into the journals for the signs of a general collapse of paper and credit; instead of which, public confidence seemed to increase, not diminish, and the paper balloon, as he called it, dilated, not shrank; and this went on for months. His gold lay a dead and useless stock, while paper was breeding paper on every side of him. He suffered his share of those mortifications which every man must look to endure who takes a course of his own, and stems a human current. He sat somber and perplexed in his bank parlor, doing nothing; his clerks mended pens in the office. The national calamity so confidently predicted, and now so eagerly sighed for, came not.

In other words, Richard Hardie was a sagacious calculator, but not a prophet; no man is till afterward, and then nine out of ten are. At last he despaired of the national calamity ever coming at all. So then, one dark November day, an event happened that proved him a shrewd calculator of probabilities in the gross, and showed that the records, of the past, "studied" instead of "skimmed," may in some degree counterbalance youth and its narrow experience. Owing to the foreign loans, there were a great many bills out against this country. Some heavy ones were presented, and seven millions in gold taken out of the Bank of England and sent abroad. This would have trickled back by degrees; but the suddenness and magnitude of the drain alarmed the bank directors for the safety of the bank, subject as it was by Mr. Peel's bill to a vast demand for gold.