er of a
dollar, which he promises to pay at a certain time. You are depending
on this quarter to settle accounts with the small shop-keeper. The
time arrives--and the quarter doesn't. That's a financial crisis, in one
sense--twenty-five senses, if I may say so.

When this same thing happens, on a grander scale, in the mercantile
world, it produces what is called a panic. One man's inability to pay
his debts ruins another man, who, in turn, ruins someone else, and
so on, until failure after failure makes even the richest capitalists
tremble. Public confidence is suspended, and the smaller fry of
merchants are knocked over like tenpins.

These commercial panics occur periodically, after the fashion of comets
and earthquakes and other disagreeable things.

Such a panic took place in New Orleans in the year 18--, and my father's
banking-house went to pieces in the crash.

Of a comparatively large fortune nothing remained after paying his debts
excepting a few thousand dollars, with which he proposed to return North
and embark in some less hazardous enterprise. In the meantime it was
necessary for him to stay in New Orleans to wind up the business.

My grandfather was in some way involved in this failure, and lost, I
fancy, a considerable sum of money; but he never talked much on the
subject. He was an unflinching believer in the spilt-milk proverb.

"It can't be gathered up," he would say, "and it's no use crying over
it. Pitch into the cow and get some more milk, is my motto."

The suspension of the banking-house was bad enough, but there was an
attending circumstance that gave us, at Rivermouth, a great deal more
anxiety. The cholera, which someone predicted would visit the country
that year, and which, indeed, had made its appearance in a mild form
at several points along the Mississippi River, had broken out with much
violence at New Orleans.

The report that first reached us through the newspapers was meagre and
contradictory; many people discredited it; but a letter from my mother
left us no room for doubt. The sickness was in the city. The hospitals
were filling up, and hundreds of the citizens were flying from the
stricken place by every steamboat. The unsettled state of my father's
affairs made it imperative for him to remain at his post; his desertion
at that moment would have been at the sacrifice of all he had saved from
the general wreck.

As he would be detained in New Orleans at least three months,