less
than they. But this was done in the pursuit of legitimate business ends.
Tens of thousands of the poor might curse his name, but the financier
and the speculator execrated him no more. He stretched a hand to protect
or to manipulate the power of wealth in every corner of the country.
Forcible, cold, and unerring, in all he did he ministered to the
national lust for magnitude; and a grateful country surnamed him the
Colossus.

But there was an aspect of Manderson in this later period that lay long
unknown and unsuspected save by a few, his secretaries and lieutenants
and certain of the associates 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
hatband. 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 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 a