"Who is the banker?" asked the count.
"James Tomlinson," answered the financier.
"I know the name well. Are you serious in your proposal?"
"Call upon me to-morrow at twelve o'clock, and we will proceed together to Mr. Tomlinson's banking house in the City. I will have the whole affair arranged for you in the course of an hour after our arrival at his establishment."
"I rely upon your word, Mr. Greenwood," returned the count.
The financier then took his departure.
CHAPTER LIV.
THE BANKER.
THE native of London is as proud of the City as if it were his own property. He can afford to be called a cockney for having been born within the sound of Bow bells, for there are merchant-princes, and the peers and monopolists of the commerce of this world, who bear the nickname as well as he.
And well may the Londoner be proud of his city in numerous respects. It is the richest and the most powerful that the world has ever seen! The dingy back parlours in Lombard Street, the upstairs business rooms in Cheapside, and the warehouses with shutters half up the windows in Wood Street and its neighbourhood, are the mysterious places in which the springs of the finance and trade of a mighty empire are set in motion? Half a dozen men in the City can command in an hour more wealth than either Rome or Babylon had to boast of at the respective periods of their greatest prosperity. And neither Rome nor Babylon possessed drapers who cleared their fifty thousand a-year by selling gowns and shawls, nor sugar-bakers with a million in hard cash, nor grocers with a plum in each hand, nor brewers to whom the rise or fall of one halfpenny per pot in the price of beer makes a difference of forty thousand pounds per annum! Rome, Babylon, Thebes, and Carthage, could all have been purchased by the East India Company—with perhaps a mortgage upon the India Docks!
But the reader must not imagine that all which glitters is gold. Amongst the most splendid establishments in London, and those most wealthy in appearance, there are some in a hopeless state of insolvency. To one of these we shall now introduce those who may choose to accompany us thither.