A KNOT AND A MAN TO CUT IT.

Consternation!  Consternation in the back office of Benjamin Brummage, Esq., banker in Wall Street.

Yesterday down came Mr. Superintendent Whiffler, from Dunderbunk, up the North River, to say, that, “unless something be done, at once, the Dunderbunk Foundry and Iron-Works must wind up.”  President Brummage forthwith convoked his Directors.  And here they sat around the green table, forlorn as the guests at a Barmecide feast.

Well they might be forlorn!  It was the rosy summer solstice, the longest and fairest day of all the year.  But rose-color and sunshine had fled from Wall Street.  Noisy Crisis towing black Panic, as a puffing steam-tug drags a three-decker cocked and primed for destruction, had suddenly sailed in upon Credit.

As all the green inch-worms vanish on the tenth of every June, so on the tenth of that June all the money in America had buried itself and was as if it were not.  Everybody and everything was ready to fail.  If the hindmost brick went, down would go the whole file.

There were ten Directors of the Dunderbunk Foundry.

Now, not seldom, of a Board of ten Directors, five are wise and five are foolish:  five wise, who bag all the Company’s funds in salaries and commissions for indorsing its paper; five foolish, who get no salaries, no commissions, no dividends,—­nothing, indeed, but abuse from the stockholders, and the reputation of thieves.  That is to say, five of the ten are pick-pockets; the other five, pockets to be picked.

It happened that the Dunderbunk Directors were all honest and foolish but one.  He, John Churm, honest and wise, was off at the West, with his Herculean shoulders at the wheels of a dead-locked railroad.  These honest fellows did not wish Dunderbunk to fail for several reasons.  First, it was not pleasant to lose their investment.  Second, one important failure might betray Credit to Crisis with Panic at its heels, whereupon every investment would be in danger.  Third, what would become of their Directorial reputations?  From President Brummage down, each of these gentlemen was one of the pockets to be picked in a great many companies.  Each was of the first Wall-Street fashion, invited to lend his name and take stock in every new enterprise.  Any one of them might have walked down town in a long patchwork toga made of the newspaper advertisements of boards in which his name proudly figured.  If Dunderbunk failed, the toga was torn, and might presently go to rags beyond repair.  The first rent would inaugurate universal rupture.  How to avoid this disaster?—­that was the question.

“State the case, Mr. Superintendent Whiffler,” said President Brummage, in his pompous manner, with its pomp a little collapsed, pro tempore.

Inefficient Whiffler whimpered out his story.