all along regarding that Bundelcund Banking Company,
in which our Colonel has invested every rupee he possesses, Solvuntur
rupees, etc. I disdain, for the most part, the tricks and surprises of
the novelist's art. Knowing, from the very beginning of our story, what
was the issue of this Bundelcund Banking concern, I have scarce had
patience to keep my counsel about it; and whenever I have had occasion
to mention the Company, have scarcely been able to refrain from breaking
out into fierce diatribes against that complicated, enormous, outrageous
swindle. It was one of many similar cheats which have been successfully
practised upon the simple folks, civilian and military, who toil and
struggle--who fight with sun and enemy--who pass years of long exile and
gallant endurance in the service of our empire in India. Agency houses
after agency houses have been established, and have flourished in
splendour and magnificence, and have paid fabulous dividends--and have
enormously enriched two or three wary speculators--and then have burst
in bankruptcy, involving widows, orphans, and countless simple people
who trusted their all to the keeping of these unworthy treasurers.

The failure of the Bundelcund Bank which we now have to record, was one
only of many similar schemes ending in ruin. About the time when Thomas
Newcome was chaired as Member of Parliament for the borough of which
he bore the name, the great Indian merchant who was at the head of
the Bundelcund Banking Company's affairs at Calcutta, suddenly died of
cholera at his palace at Barackpore. He had been giving of late a series
of the most splendid banquets with which Indian prince ever entertained
a Calcutta society. The greatest and proudest personages of that
aristocratic city had attended his feasts. The fairest Calcutta beauties
had danced in his halls. Did not poor F. B. transfer from the columns
of the Bengal Hurkaru to the Pall Mall Gazette the most astounding
descriptions of those Asiatic Nights Entertainments, of which the very
grandest was to come off on the night when cholera seized Rummun Loll
in its grip? There was to have been a masquerade outvying all European
masquerades in splendour. The two rival queens of the Calcutta society
were to have appeared each with her court around her. Young civilians
at the College, and young ensigns fresh landed, had gone into awful
expenses and borrowed money at interest from the B. B. C. and other
banking companies, in