Mr. Smithson was a great authority on the Stock Exchange, though he had ceased for the last three or four years to frequent the ‘House,’ or to be seen in the purlieus of Throgmorton Street.  Indeed he had an air of hardly knowing his way to the City, of being acquainted with that part of London only by hearsay.  He complained that his horses shied at passing Temple Bar.  And yet a few years ago Mr. Smithson’s city operations had been on a very extensive scale:  It was in the rise and fall of commodities rather than of stocks and shares that Horace Smithson had made his money.  He had exercised occult influences upon the trade of the great city, of the world itself, whereof that city is in a manner the keystone.  Iron had risen or fallen at his beck.  At the breath of his nostrils cochineal had gone up in the market at an almost magical rate, as if the whole civilised world had become suddenly intent upon dyeing its garments red, nay, as if even the naked savages of the Gold Coast and the tribes of Central Africa were bent on staining their dusky skins with the bodies of the female coccus.

Favoured by a hint from Smithson, his particular friends followed his lead, and rushed into the markets to buy all the cochineal that could be had; to buy at any price, since the market was rising hourly.  And then, all in a moment, as the sky clouds over on a summer day, there came a dulness in the cochineal market, and the female coccus was being sold at an enormous sacrifice.  And anon it leaked out that Mr. Smithson had grown tired of cochineal, and had been selling for the last week or two; and it was noised abroad that this rise and fall in cocci had brought Mr. Smithson seventy thousand pounds.

Mr. Smithson was said to have commenced life in a very humble capacity.  There were some who declared he was the very youth who stooped to pick up a pin in a Parisian banker’s courtyard, after his services as clerk had just been rejected by the firm, and who was thereupon recognised as a youth worthy of favour and taken into the banker’s office.  But this touching incident of the pin was too ancient a tradition to fit Mr. Smithson, still under forty.

Some there were who remembered him eighteen years ago as an adventurer in the great wilderness of London, penniless, friendless, a Jack-of-all-trades, living as the birds of the air live, and with as little certainty of future maintenance.  And then Mr. Smithson disappeared for a space—­he went under, as his friends called it; to re-appear fifteen years later as Smithson the millionaire.  He had been in Peru, Mexico, California.  He had traded in hides, in diamonds, in silver, in stocks and shares.  And now he was the great Smithson, whose voice was the voice of an oracle, who was supposed to be able to make the fortunes of other men by a word, or a wink, a nod, or a little look across the crowd, and whom all the men and women in London society—­short of that exclusive circle which does not open its ranks to Smithsons—­were ready to cherish and admire.