not be one of these, then?--who would not aspire to win the
enthusiasm that tracks such a career, and makes a mere mortal godlike?

"To be such I possessed the secret! Nay, madam, this is not the weakness
of faltering intellect, nor the outpouring of a silly vanity. Hear me
out with patience but a very little longer. It is not of some wonder of
science or of mystery, of occult art, that I speak; and yet the power to
which I allude is infinitely greater than any of these were ever fancied
to bestow. Imagine an engine by which the failing energies of a whole
nation can be rallied, its wasting vigor repaired, its resources
invigorated. Fancy a nation--millions--brought out of poverty, debt, and
distress, into wealth, affluence, and abundance; the springs of their
industry reinforced, the sources of their traffic refreshed. Picture
to your mind the change from an embarrassed government, a ruined
aristocracy, an indebted, poverty-stricken people, to a full treasury,
a splendid nobility, and a prosperous and powerful nation. Imagine all
this; and then, if you can ascribe the transformation to the working of
one man's intelligence, what will you say of him?

"I am not conjuring up a mere visionary or impossible triumph; what I
describe has been actually done, and he who accomplished it was my own
father!

"Yes, madam, the mightiest financial scheme the world has ever
witnessed, the grandest exemplification of the principle of credit that
has ever been promulgated by man, was his invention. He farmed the whole
revenues of France, and at one stroke annihilated the peculation of
receivers-general, and secured the revenue of the nation. He fructified
the property of the state by employing its vast resources in commercial
speculations; from the east to the west, from the fertile valley of the
Mississippi to the golden plains of Asia, he opened every land to the
enterprise of Frenchmen. Paris itself he made the capital city of the
world. Who has not heard of the splendor of the regency, of Chantilly,
the gorgeous palace of the Duc d'Orleans, the very stables more
magnificent than the residences of many princes? The wealth and the
rank of Europe flocked thither; and in the pleasures of that paradise
of capitals lies the history of an age! He who did all this was my own
father, and his name was John Law, of Lauriston! Ay, madam, you see
before you, poor, humbly clad, and gray-haired, going down to the
grave in actual want, the son o