“If she’s the devil himself, as I believe she is,” he cried, “she’s got to be took down!”
I reached my room. I lay awake all night long. A fever seemed raging in all my veins. Now with a throbbing head and trembling hands I write this. Will these be my last words? God grant it, and give me safe deliverance. Amen! amen!
CHAPTER XXX. — SMITHERS & CO.
The Brandon Bank, John Potts, President, had one day risen suddenly before the eyes of the astonished county and filled all men with curious speculations.
John Potts had been detestable, but now, as a Bank President, he began to be respectable, to say the least. Wealth has a charm about it which fascinates all men, even those of the oldest families, and now that this parvenu showed that he could easily employ his superfluous cash in a banking company, people began to look upon his name as still undoubtedly vulgar, yet as undoubtedly possessing the ring of gold.
His first effort to take the county by storm, by an ordinary invitation to Brandon Hall, had been sneered at every where. But this bank was a different thing. Many began to think that perhaps Potts had been an ill-used and slandered man. He had been Brandon’s agent, but who could prove any thing against him after all?
There were very many who soon felt the need of the peculiar help which a bank can give if it only chooses. Those who went there found Potts marvelously accommodating. He did not seem so grasping or so suspicious as other bankers. They got what they wanted, laughed at his pleasant jokes, and assured every body that he was a much-belied man.
Surely it was by some special inspiration that Potts hit upon this idea of a bank; if he wished to make people look kindly upon him, to “be to his faults a little blind, and to his virtues very kind,” he could not have conceived any better or shorter way toward the accomplishment of so desirable a result.