One day he invited several large tradesmen in the town to dine with him at the bank. They came full of curiosity. He gave them a luxurious dinner, which pleased them. After dinner he exposed the real state of the nation, as he understood it. They listened politely, and sneered silently, but visibly. He then produced six large packets of his banknotes; each packet contained 3,000 pounds. Skinner, then present, enveloped these packets in cartridge-paper, and the guests were requested to seal them up. This was soon done. In those days a bunch of gigantic seals dangled and danced on the pit of every man's stomach. The sealed packets went back into the safe.
“Show us a sparkle o' gold, Mr. Richard,” said Meredith, linen-draper and wag.
“Mr. Skinner, oblige me by showing Mr. Meredith a little of your specie—a few anti-bubble pills, eh! Mr. Meredith.”
Omnes. “Ha! ha! ha!”
Presently a shout from Meredith: “Boys, he has got it here by the bushel. All new sovereigns. Don't any of ye be a linen-draper, if you have got a chance to be a banker. How much is there here, Mr. Richard?”
“We must consult the books to ascertain that, sir.”
“Must you? Then just turn your head away, Mr. Richard, and I'll put in a claw.”
Omnes. “Haw! haw! ho!”
Richard Hardie resumed. “My precautions seem extravagant to you now, but in a few months you will remember this conversation, and it will lead to business.” The rest of the evening he talked of anything, everything, except banking. He was not the man to dilute an impression.
Hardie junior was so confident in his reading and his reasonings that he looked every day into the journals for the signs of a general collapse of paper and credit; instead of which, public confidence seemed to increase, not diminish, and the paper balloon, as he called it, dilated, not shrank; and this went on for months. His gold lay a dead and useless stock, while paper was breeding paper on every side of him. He suffered his share of those mortifications which every man must look to endure who takes a course of his own, and stems a human current. He sat somber and perplexed in his bank parlor, doing nothing; his clerks mended pens in the office. The national calamity so confidently predicted, and now so eagerly sighed for, came not.