asking, with doleful accent, “Where is this going to end?” The street, at ’change hours, presented a crowd of haggard faces, furrowed with care, their eyes fixed and despairing.  Some looked white with apprehension, some crushed and tearful, others stony, sullen, or defiant.  Whatever was bravest had been drawn out in manly endeavor; whatever was most generous was excited to sympathy and brotherly-kindness; whatever was most selfish was stimulated by the fierce desire for self-preservation; whatever was most fiendish was roused by blind rage and useless resentment.  In the halcyon days of plenty and prosperity men know little of each other; trade has its accustomed way; balances are smoothly adjusted; notes are given and paid with smiling faces; one would think that honor and manliness were the commonest of qualities.  Now, every man was put to the severest proof, and showed the inborn and essential traits of his nature.  Like a ship’s crew on a raft, alone on the ocean without provisions, they looked at each other as they were.  There, in their extremity, were to be seen calm resignation, unmanly terror, moody despair, turbulent passion, and stealthy, fiendish glances that blinked not at cannibalism itself.

Mr. Sandford, almost for the first time in his life, had been rendered nervous with apprehension.  To be sure, he was not one of the “sleek-headed men that sleep o’ nights”; he was always busy with some scheme; but, heretofore, success had followed every plan, and he had gone on with steadfast confidence.  Now the keenest foresight was of no avail; events defied calculation; misfortunes came without end and without remedy.  It was the moment of fate to him.  He had gone to the last verge, exhausted every resource, and, if there were not some help, as unlooked for as a shower of gold from heaven, he must stop payment —­he, whose credit had been spotless and without limit, whose name in the financial world was honor itself, whose influence had been a tower of strength in every undertaking.  It was not without a struggle that he brought himself to look this inexorable fact in the face.  Marcia and his sister-in-law heard him as he paced the room through the night; they had noticed his abstracted and downcast air the preceding evening; and at breakfast the few words that escaped from between his firm-set lips were sufficiently ominous.  It was the first morning that Marcia had appeared at the table, and in her feeble condition the apprehension of danger was intense and overpowering.  Mrs. Sandford tried in vain to change the conversation, by significant glances towards the invalid; but the brother was too much absorbed to notice anything outside of the gloomy circle that hemmed him in.  Muttering still of “ruin,” “beggary,” and similar topics, so admirably adapted to cheer the convalescent, he swallowed his breakfast like an animal, left the room without his usual bland “good morning,” and slammed the street-door after him.