CHAPTER I.

School begins.

Forty years ago Mr. Savory Gray was a prosperous merchant.  No gentleman on ’Change wore more spotless linen or blacker broadcloth.  His ample white cravat had an air of absolute wisdom and honesty.  It was so very white that his fellow-merchants could not avoid a vague impression that he had taken the church on his way down town, and had so purified himself for business.  Indeed a white cravat is strongly to be recommended as a corrective and sedative of the public mind.  Its advantages have long been familiar to the clergy; and even, in some desperate cases, politicians have found a resort to it of signal benefit.  There are instructive instances, also, in banks and insurance offices of the comfort and value of spotless linen.  Combined with highly-polished shoes, it is of inestimable mercantile advantage.

Mr. Gray prospered in business, and nobody was sorry.  He enjoyed his practical joke and his glass of Madeira, which had made at least three voyages round the Cape.  His temperament, like his person, was just unctuous enough to enable him to slip comfortably through life.

Happily for his own comfort, he had but a speaking acquaintance with politics.  He was not a blue Federalist, and he never d’d the Democrats.  With unconscious skill he shot the angry rapids of discussion, and swept, by a sure instinct, toward the quiet water on which he liked to ride.  In the counting-room or the meeting of directors, when his neighbors waxed furious upon raking over some outrage of that old French infidel, Tom Jefferson, as they called him, sending him and his gun-boats where no man or boat wants to go, Mr. Gray rolled his neck in his white cravat, crossed his legs, and shook his black-gaitered shoe, and beamed, and smiled, and blew his nose, and hum’d, and ha’d, and said, “Ah, yes!” “Ah, indeed?” “Quite so!” and held his tongue.

Mr. Savory Gray minded his own business; but his business did not mind him.  There came a sudden crash—­one of the commercial earthquakes that shake fortunes to their foundations and scatter failure on every side.  One day he sat in his office consoling his friend Jowlson, who had been ruined.  Mr. Jowlson was terribly agitated—­credit gone—­fortune wrecked—­no prospects—­“O wife and children!” he cried, rocking to and fro as he sat.

“My dear Jowlson, you must not give way in this manner.  You must control your feelings.  Have we not always been taught,” said Mr. Gray, as a clerk brought in a letter, the seal of which the merchant broke leisurely, and then skimmed the contents as he continued, “that riches have wings and—­my God!” he ejaculated, springing up, “I am a ruined man!”

So he was.  Every thing was gone.  Those pretty riches that chirped and sang to him as he fed them; they had all spread their bright plumage, like a troop of singing birds—­have we not always been taught that they might, Mr. Jowlson?—­and had flown away.