es
call middle age, and friends call youth. That he would never see a
five-and-thirtieth birthday again was certain; but whether he had passed
the Rubicon of forty was open to doubt. It is possible that he was
enjoying those few golden years between thirty-five and forty, which for
the wealthy bachelor constitute verily the prime and summer-tide of
life. Wisdom has come, experience has been bought, taste has been
cultivated, the man has educated himself to the uttermost in the great
school of daily life. He knows his world thoroughly, whatever that world
is, and he knows how to enjoy every gift and every advantage which
Providence has bestowed upon him.

Mr. Smithson was a great authority on the Stock Exchange, though he had
ceased for the last three or four years to frequent the 'House,' or to
be seen in the purlieus of Throgmorton Street. Indeed he had an air of
hardly knowing his way to the City, of being acquainted with that part
of London only by hearsay. He complained that his horses shied at
passing Temple Bar. And yet a few years ago Mr. Smithson's city
operations had been on a very extensive scale: It was in the rise and
fall of commodities rather than of stocks and shares that Horace
Smithson had made his money. He had exercised occult influences upon the
trade of the great city, of the world itself, whereof that city is in a
manner the keystone. Iron had risen or fallen at his beck. At the breath
of his nostrils cochineal had gone up in the market at an almost magical
rate, as if the whole civilised world had become suddenly intent upon
dyeing its garments red, nay, as if even the naked savages of the Gold
Coast and the tribes of Central Africa were bent on staining their dusky
skins with the bodies of the female coccus.

Favoured by a hint from Smithson, his particular friends followed his
lead, and rushed into the markets to buy all the cochineal that could be
had; to buy at any price, since the market was rising hourly. And then,
all in a moment, as the sky clouds over on a summer day, there came a
dulness in the cochineal market, and the female coccus was being sold at
an enormous sacrifice. And anon it leaked out that Mr. Smithson had
grown tired of cochineal, and had been selling for the last week or two;
and it was noised abroad that this rise and fall in cocci had brought
Mr. Smithson seventy thousand pounds.

Mr. Smithson was said to have commenced life in a very humble capacity.
There were some w