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.