The bank itself was small and grave, and a trifle dingy, and bustle there was none in it; but if the stream of business looked sluggish and narrow, it was deep and quietly incessant, and tended all one way—­to enrich the proprietor without a farthing risked.

Old Hardie had sat there forty years with other people’s money overflowing into his lap as it rolled deep and steady through that little counting-house, when there occurred, or rather recurred, a certain phenomenon, which comes, with some little change of features, in a certain cycle of commercial changes as regularly as the month of March in the year, or the neap-tides, or the harvest moon, but, strange to say, at each visit takes the country by surprise.

CHAPTER XII.

THE nation had passed through the years of exhaustion and depression that follow a long war; its health had returned, and its elastic vigor was already reviving, when two remarkable harvests in succession, and an increased trade with the American continent, raised it to prosperity.  One sign of vigor, the roll of capital, was wanting; speculation was fast asleep.  The government of the day seems to have observed this with regret.  A writer of authority on the subject says that, to stir stagnant enterprise, they directed “the Bank of England to issue about four millions in advances to the state and in enlarged discounts.”  I give you the man’s words; they doubtless carry a signification to you, though they are jargon in a fog to me.  Some months later the government took a step upon very different motives, which incidentally had a powerful effect in loosening capital and setting it in agitation.  They reduced to four per cent the Navy Five per Cents, a favorite national investment, which represented a capital of two hundred millions.  Now, when men have got used to five per cent from a certain quarter, they cannot be content with four, particularly the small holders; so this reduction of the Navy Five per Cents unsettled several thousand capitalists, and disposed them to search for an investment.  A flattering one offered itself in the nick of time.  Considerable attention had been drawn of late to the mineral wealth of South America, and one or two mining companies existed, but languished in the hands of professed speculators.  The public now broke like a sudden flood into these hitherto sluggish channels of enterprise, and up went the shares to a high premium.

Almost contemporaneously, numerous joint-stock companies were formed, and directed toward schemes of internal industry.  The small capitalists that had sold out of the Navy Five per Cents threw themselves into them all, and being bona fide speculators, drew hundreds in their train.  Adventure, however, was at first restrained in some degree by the state of the currency.  It was low, and rested on a singularly sound basis.  Mr. Peel’s Currency Bill had been some months in operation; by its principal provision the Bank of