By-and-by he lit a cigar, and walked musingly along, looking up at the moon. A reader for the daily press going homewards after his day’s work, looked at him, and put him down for a sentimental swell, planning a plot for a poem, or rehearsing some great scene for a new novel.
How clever we all are in reading character! Let us hope the poor newspaper fag read his proofs better than he read Shuffleton Gibbs.
CHAPTER XIII.
DESCRIBES A GREAT FINANCIAL STORM AND EXHIBITS THOMAS DIBBLE IN A NEW CHARACTER.
It came steadily but surely, gently at first, like great storms come, with a gradual lowering of the clouds and a gradual increase in the wind. It began in a calm—a quiet, happy, pleasant calm—a calm that may be typified by a man seated on the lawn at Barton, and smoking in the shade, with sheep bleating at a distance.
It came out of a calm, we say—a delightful time of rising markets, when the bulls of the Stock Exchange were in clover, and the bears at fault. It began when most kinds of shares were at a premium; when all sorts of companies were paying big dividends, and 5l. shares were selling at 8l. and 10l.; when everything was “looking up;” when men bought to invest, and even bought one day to sell the next at a profit. First, there was a whisper from the Continent which agitated the financial atmosphere for a moment—the first breeze of the coming storm. The bears sniffed it, but the bulls feared it not; and shares for a moment wavered, only to recover and make the calm seem all the more assuring. Then a whisper came from the New World, and there was an Atlantic roughness about it at which the bears opened their nostrils and sniffed with a hungry relish. The bulls wavered still in doubt, and then in a sudden darkness the big clouds gathered, and the wind blew a hurricane—blew tempestuously from the shores of France, with tributary winds from Austria and Prussia, and local winds from St. Stephen’s. Then the bears growled and frisked and bit and bellowed, and the bulls fought hard and butted with their horns; but the bears tore and lacerated them: for the financial storm had come, and there was panic everywhere. The Genii of Finance no longer in the sun looked hideous and fearful, and the magicians who had hitherto controlled them had lost their power, because the world had faith in them no longer. The story is not new; it crops up afresh once in about every eight or ten years.
The newspapers did not describe the storm as we have described it. They conveyed the intelligence in technical terms which made it hard and biting:—“Orientals are now at 1¹⁄₄ to 1¹⁄₈ dis.; Credits, 1 to ⁷⁄₈; Unity shares have declined to 8 to 7¹⁄₂ dis.; Imperials have gone to 5¹⁄₈ to 4³⁄₈ dis.; Discount Company, ³⁄₈ to ¹⁄₄ dis.; Overton, Baker and Co.’s Bank, ⁷⁄₈ to ³⁄₄ dis. The railway market continues dull, with a downward tendency; there is a further reduction of ¹⁄₄ to ¹⁄₂ per cent. in Great Western, South Eastern, Great Eastern, and Great Northerns.
“Another serious failure is reported from Liverpool, and the directors of the Bank of England have to-day raised the minimum rate of discount from 6 to 7 per cent.”
This was the fragmentary way in which the newspapers indicated the financial storm, and the figures started up in the night, like fiends, haunting the pillows of many a man, in town and in country, who had been induced to “speculate” in a few finance and other shares “just to make a little money”—men who had never touched shares before, and did not even know the “beastly” title affixed to professional buyers and sellers on the Stock Exchange. To them a bull meant an animal that was dangerous in the fields, and grand at agricultural shows; and a bear was an ugly brute that climbed up a pole at the Zoological Gardens. William Jones the grocer and Timothy Robinson the draper, who had been induced to buy a few Overtons, or Orientals, at 3 premium, in the hope of selling at 5 or 6 premium before the half-yearly meeting, were nothing more than bulls, nevertheless, in Stock Exchange phraseology, and only to become despondent and miserable bears at 5 or 10 discount.
“Been bulling the market, Mithter Dibble? Pray explain yourself, and don’t offend a woman’s thenthibilities by such terms as that,” said Mrs. Thomas Dibble, leaning back in her chair, and vainly endeavouring to thread a needle.
“Bulling means selling, my love,” said Thomas, trembling; “selling shares without having them, you see, and——”