in the mean time. Remember me to A.
B., and keep him from talking nonsense about the business,--for a while,
at least,--that is, if you can, and

"Believe me, yours, as ever,

"C. Davis."

CHAPTER XXXV. THE TRIAL

Scarcely had the town been struck by the large placards announcing the
dreadful murder of Davenport Dunn, which paraded the streets in all
directions, when a second edition of the morning papers brought the
first tidings of the ruin that was to follow that event; and now, in
quick succession, came news that the treasurer of the grand Glengariff
Company had gone off with some fifty thousand pounds; that the great
Ossory Bank had stopped payment; companies on every hand smashing';
misfortune and calamity everywhere. Terrible as was the detail which the
inquest revealed, the whole interest of the world was turned to the less
striking but scarcely less astounding news that society had for years
back been the dupe of the most crafty and unprincipled knave of all
Europe, that the great idol of its worship, the venerated and respected
in all enterprises of industry, the man of large philanthropy and wide
benevolence, was a schemer and a swindler, unprincipled and unfeeling.
The fatal machinery of deception and falsehood which his life maintained
crumbled to ruin at the very moment of his death; he was himself the
mainspring of all fraud, and when he ceased to dictate, the game of
roguery was over. While, therefore, many deplored the awful crime which
had just been committed, and sorrowed over the stain cast upon our age
and our civilization, there arose amidst their grief the wilder and more
heartrending cry of thousands brought to destitution and beggary by this
bold, bad man.

Of the vast numbers who had dealings with him, scarcely any escaped:
false title-deeds, counterfeited shares, forged scrip abounded. The
securities intrusted to his keeping in all the trustfulness of an
unlimited confidence had been pledged for loans of money; vast sums
alleged to have been advanced on mortgage were embezzled without a
shadow of security. From the highest in the peerage to the poorest
peasant, all were involved in the same scheme of ruin, and the great
fortunes of the rich and the hardly saved pittance of the poor alike
engulfed. So suddenly did the news break upon the world that it actually
seemed incredible. It was not alone a shock given to mercantile credit
and commercial honesty, but it seemed an outrage aga