of his bygone hurling time. This little
circle knew that Manderson, the pillar of sound business and stability
in the markets, had his hours of nostalgia for the lively times when the
Street had trembled at his name. It was, said one of them, as if
Blackbeard had settled down as a decent merchant in Bristol on the
spoils of the Main. Now and then the pirate would glare suddenly out,
the knife in his teeth and the sulphur matches sputtering in his
hat-band. During such spasms of reversion to type a score of tempestuous
raids upon the market had been planned on paper in the inner room of the
offices of Manderson, Colefax and Company. But they were never carried
out. Blackbeard would quell the mutiny of his old self within him and go
soberly down to his counting-house--humming a stave or two of "Spanish
Ladies," perhaps, under his breath. Manderson would allow himself the
harmless satisfaction, as soon as the time for action had gone by, of
pointing out to some Rupert of the markets how a coup worth a million to
the depredator might have been made. "Seems to me," he would say almost
wistfully, "the Street is getting to be a mighty dull place since I
quit." By slow degrees this amiable weakness of the Colossus became
known to the business world, which exulted greatly in the knowledge.

* * * * *

At the news of his death, panic went through the markets like a
hurricane; for it came at a luckless time. Prices tottered and crashed
like towers in an earthquake. For two days Wall Street was a clamorous
inferno of pale despair. All over the United States, wherever
speculation had its devotees, went a waft of ruin, a plague of suicide.
In Europe also not a few took with their own hands lives that had become
pitiably linked to the destiny of a financier whom most of them had
never seen. In Paris a well-known banker walked quietly out of the
Bourse and fell dead upon the broad steps among the raving crowd of
Jews, a phial crushed in his hand. In Frankfort one leaped from the
Cathedral top, leaving a redder stain where he struck the red tower. Men
stabbed and shot and strangled themselves, drank death or breathed it as
the air, because in a lonely corner of England the life had departed
from one cold heart vowed to the service of greed.

The blow could not have fallen at a more disastrous moment. It came when
Wall Street was in a condition of suppressed "scare." Suppressed:
because for a week past th