“Who showed the white feather, Mr. Skinner?  Who came creeping and sniveling, and took my hand under the counter, and pressed it to give me courage, and then was absurd enough to make apologies, as if sympathy was as common as dirt?  Give me your hand directly, you old—­Hallo!”

“God bless you, sir!  God bless you!  It is all right, sir.  The bank is safe for another fifty years.  We have got Master Richard, and he has got a head.  O Gemini, what a head he has got, and the other day playing marbles!”

“Yes, and we are interrupting him with our nonsense.  Go on, Richard.”

Richard had secretly but fully appreciated the folly of the interruption.  His was a great mind, and moved in a sort of pecuniary ether high above the little weaknesses my reader has observed in Hardie senior and old Skinner.  Being, however, equally above the other little infirmities of fretfulness and fussiness, he waited calmly and proceeded coolly.

“What was the cause of the distress in 1793?”

“Ah! that was the puzzle—­wasn’t it, Skinner?  We were never so prosperous as that year.  The distress came over us like a thunder-storm all in a moment.  Nobody knows the exact cause.”

“I beg your pardon, sir, it is as well known as any point of history whatever.  Some years of prosperity had created a spawn of country banks, most of them resting on no basis; these had inflated the circulation with their paper.  A panic and a collapse of this fictitious currency was as inevitable as the fall of a stone forced against nature into the air.”

“There were a great many petty banks, Richard, and, of course, plenty of bad paper.  I believe you are right.  The causes of things were not studied in those days as they are now.”

“All that we know now, sir, is to be found in books written long before 1793.”

“Books! books!”

“Yes, sir; a book is not dead paper except to sleepy minds.  A book is a man giving you his best thoughts in his very best words.  It is only the shallow reader that can’t learn life from genuine books.  I’ll back him who studies them against the man who skims his fellow-creatures, and vice versa.  A single page of Adam Smith, studied, understood, and acted on by the statesmen of your day, would have averted the panic of 1793.  I have the paragraph in my note-book.  He was a great man, sir; oblige me, Mr. Skinner.”

“Certainly, sir, certainly.  ’Should the circulation of paper exceed the value of the gold and silver of which it supplies the place, many people would immediately perceive they had more of this paper than was necessary for transacting their business at home; and, as they could not send it abroad, bank paper only passing current where it is issued, there would be a run upon the banks to the extent of this superfluous paper.’”