[CHAPTER II.]
GREAT USEFULNESS OF THE BANK—SURPRISING GROWTH OF QUODLIBET—SOME ACCOUNT OF THE HON. MIDDLETON FLAM—ORIGIN OF HIS DEMOCRACY—HIS LOGICAL ARGUMENT IN FAVOR OF THE POCKETING OF THE BILL TO REPEAL THE SPECIE CIRCULAR—THE DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLE AS DEVELOPED IN THE REPRESENTATIVE SYSTEM.
In the course of the first year after The Removal, or as I should say, in the year One—speaking after our manner in Quodlibet—the bank made itself very agreeable to everybody. Mr. Flam came home from Congress after the end of the long session, and found everything prospering beyond his most sanguine expectations. Nicodemus Handy had put a new weather-boarded room to the back of his office for the use of the Directors, and the banking business was transacted in the front apartment where Nicodemus used to sell lottery tickets. There was one thing that strangers visiting Quodlibet were accustomed to remark upon in a jocular vein, regarding the bank—and that was the sign which was placed, as it were parapet-wise, along the eaves of the roof, and being of greater longitude than the front of the building, projected considerably at either end. Quipes has been held responsible for this, but I know that he could not help it, on account of the length of the name, which, nevertheless, it is due to him to say he endeavored, very much to my discontent, to shorten, both by orthographical device and by abbreviation, having painted it thus—
The Patriotic Coperplate Bank Of Quodlibet;
notwithstanding which, it overran the dimensions of the tenement to which it was attached. I say strangers sometimes facetiously alluded to this discrepancy, by observing that the bank was like the old Hero himself, too great for the frame that contained it. And, truly, the bank did a great business! Mr. Handy, who is acknowledged to be a man of taste, procured one of the handsomest plates, it is supposed, that Murray, Draper & Fairman ever executed, and with about six bales of pinkish silk paper, and a very superior cylinder press, created an amount of capital which soon put to rest old Mr. Grant's grumbling about the want of solidity in the bank, and fully justified the Secretary's declaration of his confidence in its "established character as affording a sufficient guarantee for the safety of the public money intrusted to its keeping."
As a proof how admirably matters were conducted by Mr. Handy, the Directors soon found no other reason to attend at the Board than now and then to hold a chat upon politics and smoke a cigar; and the President, the Hon. Middleton Flam, having his October election on hand, was so thoroughly convinced of Nicodemus's ability, that I do not believe he went into the bank more than half a dozen times during the whole season.
It was in the course of this year, and pretty soon after the bank got the deposits, that Mr. Handy began his row of four story brick warehouses on the Basin, which now goes by the name of Nicodemus Row. He also laid the foundation of his mansion on the hill, fronting upon Handy Place; and which edifice he subsequently finished, so much to the adornment of our Borough, with a Grecian portico in front, and an Italian veranda looking toward the garden. As his improvements advanced in this and the next year, he successively reared a Temple of Minerva on the top of the ice-house, a statue of Apollo in the center of the carriage-circle, a sun-dial on a marble pillar where the garden walks intersect, and a gilded dragon weather-cock on the cupola of the stables. The new banking house was commenced early in the summer, and has been finished of very beautiful granite, being in its front, if I am rightly informed by Mr. Handy, an exact miniature copy of the Tomb of Osymandias: it is situated on Flam Street, the first after you leave the Basin, going northward. All the Directors, except Fog, followed the footsteps of their illustrious predecessor, Mr. Handy, and went to work to build themselves villas on the elevated ground back of the Borough, now known by the name of Copperplate Ridge,—which villas were duly completed in all manner of Greek, Roman, and Tuscan fashions. These being likewise imitated, in turn, by many friends of the bank who migrated hither from all parts and cast their lines in our Borough, Quodlibet hath thereby, very suddenly, grown to be, in a figurative sense, a pattern card of the daintiest structures of the four quarters of the world. Perhaps I may be too fast in making so broad an assertion—cupio non putari mendacem—I am not quite sure that, as yet, we have any well ascertained specimen of the Asiatic: but if Nicodemus Handy's pagoda, which he talked of building on the knoll in the center of his training course, had not been interrupted by an untoward event, of which it may become my duty to speak hereafter, I should, in that case, have made no difficulty in reiterating, with a clear conscience and without reservation, the remark which distrustfully and with claim of allowance I have ventured above.
My valuable patron not being resident actually within the Borough, and being, as I have said, very busy in the matter of his election during the greater part of the first year of the bank, had not much opportunity to devote himself to its concerns. But the Directors, partly aware of their own knowledge, how valuable was his influence with the Secretary, and partly persuaded thereof by the Cashier, established, with a liberality which Mr. Handy remarked at the time was exceedingly gentlemanlike, his salary as President at three thousand dollars a year—which sum, Mr. Flam himself has, more than once in my hearing, averred upon his honor, he did not consider one cent too much. And indeed, I feel myself bound to express my concurrence in this opinion, when I reflect upon the weight of his character, the antiquity of his family, the preponderance of his strong Democratic sentiments, and the expenses to which, as President, he was exposed in looking after the interests of the bank—more especially in the journeys to Washington, whereof I have heard him speak, for the purpose of explaining matters to the Secretary.
Connected with this matter of salary, and as having a natural propinquity to the subject, I may here cursorily, for I design to be more particular on this point hereafter, claim the privilege to enter a little into the family matters of my patron. And on this head, I would observe that the household of Mr. Flam is large. Of a truth, as some philosopher has remarked, mouths are not fed, nor bodies clad, without considerable of the wherewithal! There is Mrs. Flam, the venerated consort of our representative—a lady most honorably conducive to the multiplication of the strength and glory of this land; there is, likewise, Mr. Flam's sister Janet—truly an honor to her sex for instructive discourse and exemplary life; and there is Master Middleton, Junior, with his four sisters and three brothers, who may be all ranged into the semblance of a step-ladder. Great is Mr. Flam's parental tenderness toward this happy progeny—the reduplication and retriplication, if I may so express it, of himself and their respectable mamma. Yielding to the solicitude inspired by this tenderness, almost the first thing which our representative did, after the establishment of the bank—the means having thereby come the better to his hand—was to send Master Middleton, Junior, who was very urgent in his entreaties to that point, to Europe, that the young gentleman, by two or three years travel, might witness the distresses and oppressions of monarchical government, and become confirmed in his democratic sentiments. A refinement of sensibility in Mr. Flam, which I might almost denominate fastidious, has also operated with him to require the education of his daughters to be conducted under his own roof. He would never hear, for one moment, any persuasion to trust them, even at their earliest age, in the public school—considerately fearful lest they might form intimacies unbecoming the station to which he destined them in after-life. They have consequently been placed under the special tuition of a most estimable lady, Mademoiselle Jonquille, a resident governess, who is enjoined to speak to them nothing but French. This lady, among other things, teaches them music, and is aided in the arduous duties allotted to her by a drawing-master of acknowledged ability in water-colors, and a very superior professor of dancing, who instructs them in the elegant accomplishment of waltzing and galloping, which, Mr. Flam says, is now-a-days held to be indispensable in the first Democratic circles at Washington, where it has always been his design to introduce the young ladies into high life.
It will not be out of place here to mention that the worthy subject of this desultory memoir, my patron and former pupil, inherited a large fortune from his father, the late Judge Flam, who was especially honored by old John Adams, or, as the better phrase is, the elder Adams, with an appointment to the bench on the night of the third of March, Anno Domini 1801; and I have often heard Mr. Middleton say that his father had, up to the day of his lamented departure from this world, which melancholy event happened in the year of our Lord 1825, the greatest respect for General Jackson; which liking for the Old Hero descended to his son, along with the family estate, and serves satisfactorily to account for my former pupil's ardent attachment to Democratic principles, as in the sequel I shall make appear.