ould be held
responsible for frauds of years' standing. No one argued with him, and
indeed you might say anything you pleased, for each was so much taken
up with his own case that he only listened to you that he might
establish a claim in turn on your attention. Here and there a noisy
and confident personage got a larger audience by professing to have
private information. A second-rate stockbroker assured quite a
congregation that the assets of the bank included an estate in
Australia, which would more than pay the whole debt, and advised them
to see that it was not flung away; and a Government pensioner mentioned
casually in his neighbourhood, on the authority of one of the managers,
that there was not that day a solvent bank in Scotland. The different
conversations rise to a babel, various speakers enforce their views on
the floor with umbrellas, one enthusiast exhorts his brother
unfortunates from a chair, when suddenly there is a hush, and then in a
painful silence the shareholders hang on the lips of the accountant,
from whom they learn that things could not be worse, that the richest
shareholder may be ruined, and that ordinary people will lose their
last penny.

Speech again breaks forth, but now it is despairing, fierce,
vindictive. One speaker storms against Government which allows public
institutions to defraud the public, and refers to himself as the widow
and orphan, and another assails the directorate with bitter invective
as liars and thieves, and insists on knowing whether they are to be
punished. The game having now been unearthed, the pack follow in full
cry. The tradesman tells with much gusto how one director asked the
detectives for leave to have family prayers before he was removed, and
then declares his conviction that when a man takes to praying you had
better look after your watch. Ayrshire wished to inform the accountant
and the authorities that the directors had conveyed to their wives and
friends enormous sums which ought to be seized without delay. The air
grew thick with upbraidings, complaints, cries for vengeance, till the
place reeked with sordid passions. Through all this ignoble storm the
Drumtochty men sat silent, amazed, disgusted, till at last the Doctor
rose, and such authority was in his very appearance that with his first
words he obtained a hearing.

"Mr. Accountant," he said, "and gentlemen, it appears to me as if under
a natural provocation and suffering we are in d