The youth explained to him that blind confidence always ends in blind distrust. and then all paper becomes depreciated alike, but good paper is sure to recover.  “Sixty-two shillings discount, sir, is a ridiculous decline of Exchequer bills.  We are at peace, and elastic, and the government is strong.  My other purchases all rest upon certain information, carefully and laboriously amassed while the world was so busy blowing bubbles.  I am now buying paper that is unjustly depreciated in Panic, i.e., in the second act of that mania of which Bubble is the first act.”  He added:  “When the herd buy, the price rises; when they sell, it falls.  To buy with them and sell with them is therefore to buy dear and sell cheap.  My game—­and it is a game that reduces speculation to a certainty—­is threefold: 

“First, never, at any price or under any temptation, buy anything that is not as good as gold.

“Secondly, buy that sound article when the herd sells it.

“Thirdly, sell it when the herd buys it.”

“Richard,” said the old man, “I see what it is—­you are a genius.”

“No.”

“It is no use your denying it, Richard.”

“Common sense, sir, common sense.”

“Yes, but common sense carried to such a height as you do is genius.”

“Well, sir, then I own to the genius of common sense.”

“I admire you, Richard—­I am proud of you; but the bank has stood one hundred and forty years, and never a genius in it;” the old man sighed.

Hardie senior, having relieved his mind of this vague misgiving, never returned to it—­probably never felt it again.  It was one of those strange flashes that cross a mind as a meteor the sky.

The old gentleman, having little to do, talked more than heretofore, and, like fathers, talked about his son, and, unlike sons, cried him up at his own expense.  The world is not very incredulous; above all, it never disbelieves a man who calls himself a fool.  Having then gained the public ear by the artifice of self-depreciation, he poured into it the praises of Hardie junior.  He went about telling how he, an old man, was all but bubbled till this young Daniel came down and foretold all.  Thus paternal garrulity combined for once with a man’s own ability to place Richard Hardie on the pinnacle of provincial grandeur.

A few years more and Hardie senior died. (His old clerk, Skinner, followed him a month later.)

Richard Hardie, now sole partner and proprietor, assumed a mode of living unknown to his predecessors.  He built a large, commodious house, and entertained in the first style.  The best families in the neighborhood visited a man whose manner was quiet and stately, his income larger than their own, and his house and table luxurious without vulgar pretensions, and the red-hot gilding and glare with which the injudicious parvenu brands himself and furniture.

The bank itself put on a new face.  Twice as much glass fronted the street, and a skylight was let into the ceiling:  there were five clerks instead of three; the new ones at much smaller salaries than the pair that had come down from antiquity.