ing with us? We don't want them and their bills. We were a
leading house fifty years before they were born, and shall continue to
be so long after they come to an end." Such was Barnes's case, as
stated by himself. It was not a very bad one, or very unfairly stated,
considering the advocate. I believe he has always persisted in thinking
that he never did his uncle any wrong.

Mr. Jolly and Mr. Sherrick, then, both entreated Thomas Newcome to use
his best endeavours, and bring the connexion of the B. B. C. and Hobson
Brothers to a speedy end. But Jolly was an interested party; he and
his friends would have had the agency of the B. B. C., and the profits
thereof, which Hobsons had taken from them. Mr. Sherrick was an outside
practitioner, a guerilla amongst regular merchants. The opinions of
one and the other, though submitted by Thomas Newcome duly to his
co-partners, the managers and London board of directors of the
Bundelcund Banking Company, were overruled by that assembly.

They had their establishment and apartments in the City; they had
their clerks and messengers, their managers' room and board-room, their
meetings, where no doubt great quantities of letters were read, vast
ledgers produced; where Tom Newcome was voted into the chair, and voted
out with thanks; where speeches were made, and the affairs of the B.
B. C. properly discussed. These subjects are mysterious, terrifying,
unknown to me. I cannot pretend to describe them. Fred Bayham, I
remember, used to be great in his knowledge of the affairs of the
Bundelcund Banking Company. He talked of cotton, wool, copper, opium,
indigo, Singapore, Manilla, China, Calcutta, Australia, with prodigious
eloquence and fluency. His conversation was about millions. The most
astounding paragraphs used to appear in the Pall Mall Gazette, regarding
the annual dinner at Blackwall, which the directors gave, and to which
he, and George, and I, as friends of the court, were invited. What
orations were uttered, what flowing bumpers emptied in the praise of
this great Company; what quantities of turtle and punch did Fred devour
at its expense! Colonel Newcome was the kindly old chairman at
these banquets; the prince, his son, taking but a modest part in the
ceremonies, and sitting with us, his old cronies.

All the gentlemen connected with the board, all those with whom the B.
B. C. traded in London, paid Thomas Newcome extraordinary respect. His
character for wealth was deserved