d Dunn Valley"
railroad, which he had been chiefly instrumental in starting, and the
stock of which he held largely, had promised well for a time, and would
doubtless pay well in the end; but in the meantime, the big men of
Fosbrooke, who had been allowed to say less than they wished to say as
to the location of the road, were agitating the subject of another road
to connect more directly with the Grand Trunk, and with other lines on
the south side of the border, and "Hawkshead and Dunn Valley" stock had
gone down.

So Jacob candidly acknowledged that "the banks were crowding a little,"
whenever he found it necessary to ask for the use of a fellow-townsman's
name to his paper. He found it necessary a good many times these days,
and he was not very often refused. For there were few of the old
settlers whom he or his father had not obliged in the same way at one
time or the other, as he took occasion to tell the sons of some of them
now and then. And besides this, giving one's name was a mere form, very
convenient in the way of business, which in those days was supposed to
be done more rapidly than had been the way in old times.

That any of the signers, "joint and several," ever imagined that they
might, in the course of untoward events, be called upon to make good the
promise to pay that stood over their names, is not likely. Nor did
Jacob himself ever contemplate so painful a possibility. Serious as he
saw his difficulties to be, he saw a way out of them--or he would have
done so, he said to himself bitterly, if the will of an unreasonable old
man had not stood in his way.

In the establishment and success of the new Company, so long the subject
of discussion in the town, lay his best chance of freeing himself from
his present embarrassment. If he might have had his way as to the site,
so that the building might have been commenced, there would have been no
trouble about the Company. A few good names with his own, and a
moderate amount of capital, with the dam and the buildings commenced,
there would have been no trouble about the rest. He felt that he would
then have been master of the situation. Every cottage needed for the
Mill hands and their families must be built on his land; and the chances
were that by judicious management as to building, every one of them
might become his tenant; and he had already in view certain arrangements
by which most of the materials for building, and many of the supplies
fo