“Don’t talk of peaches,” said the Doctor, who, I will own, was anything but an agreeable guest; “you must cross the broad Atlantic before you talk of peaches, I reckon. I’ve fed pigs with better than your dukes and earls could show. I’ve bought in the market twenty-nine big peaches for thirty cents, I have. We do crow over you in peaches, as in most, only your national vanity won’t permit you to see it.”
The Colonel jumped from his chair. “You be quiet!” said he; “the Doctor is a glowing patriot, Mr Bulkeley; but I know he admires your delightful snuggery, embellished by art and high-flying taste, as much as I do myself. Some day, as a director of the Nauvoo and Nebraska, you may, if you please, build a palace on the site of Magnolia Villa that will take the shine out of the sumptuous halls of your nobility. But enough of business. Gentlemen, if you have liquored sufficiently, we will join the ladies.”
We did join the ladies. We found them strolling over the lawn in the cool of a September evening, and presently we all went in to coffee. I noticed that the Colonel was very polite and attentive, not only to my wife, but to young Mrs Harris, who was exceedingly stupid and plain of feature. As for Mrs and Miss Jarman, they were entertained by the Doctor with an amusing dissertation on the difference between America and England, and especially between London and New York. If Mrs Jarman had hitherto cherished a belief in the pre-eminence of London, as she apparently had, she must have received a considerable shock as the Doctor informed her that Belgravia was but a poor place to Fourth and Fifth Avenue, and that we were benighted creatures in all matters of elegance and taste.
“Not a mahogany door, I guess, have I seen in this smoky beggarly town of yours,” said Dr Bett, with both thumbs in the pockets of his black satin vest; “and as for silver knockers and bell-pulls, I might as well look for liberty in your institutions, or for sincerity in your press. The helps are enough to disgust all free-born men; to see them in plush and powder, with gold-sticks and nosegays, standing behind the gilt vehicles of an effete aristocracy, is alone a spectacle that beats earthquakes; and your Life Guards would sing small, I guess, by the side of the Brooklyn Volunteers.”
The Colonel, however, could be complimentary and gentle, if his brother republican could not; and so well did he play his cards, that when the company drove off, and the last grinding of their carriage-wheels upon the gravel had died away, my wife and daughters turned to me with beaming faces, and began to sing the praises of their departed guest.
“A most superior, well-informed, gentlemanly man, is Colonel Sling,” said the partner of my joys, emphatically.
“A delightful man!” lisped Georgina, my eldest.
“Quite an Admirable Crichton,” said Selina, my second, who is a bit of a blue.
“Delightful! he has so much conversation, and makes one laugh so!” cried artless Lucy, the third and youngest of my daughters.
So he had pleased them all, and, I admit, he had pleased me too; but he mostly showed his tact in winning the suffrages of the feminine members of my household. For Mrs Bulkeley is not a cipher by any means, even in my business transactions, and she has an amiable habit of warning me against entering into commercial relations with any one she mistrusts or dislikes. The next day beheld assembled in the showy Pall Mall chambers of Colonel Sling the same quartette that had closed around the mahogany in Magnolia Villa on the preceding day. Tom Harris and I drove down there together from the City, and we found the two Americans awaiting us with a hearty welcome. There were maps on a great table, and plans, and minerals, and parchments, and heaps of papers, carefully stacked and docqueted, and files of letters with great red seals to them that would have carried conviction home to the most incredulous. And the Colonel, after the first salutations were over, and after tenderly inquiring about the health of my womankind, commenced a lucid explanation of the exact position of the Nauvoo and Nebraska Railway—its position, I mean, in a pecuniary point of view, not its geographical position. The latter, we ascertained by a glance at the map, to be in the free State of Iowa, skirting Missouri, and with one terminus in Illinois State and the other in Nebraska Territory. But information now came showering upon us, and the Colonel was extremely careful to prove every fresh axiom which he laid down by an appeal to documents of the most incontrovertible character. There was the original concession of the line, approved by the State Legislature, signed by the governor, registered by the State’s law officers and by the Federal attorney of the district. There were similar documents, to which the autographs of the governors of Nebraska and Illinois were attached. There were the reports of surveyors, the accounts of contractors, subcontractors, architects, machinists, and ironmasters. Moreover, there were specimens of minerals found in the immediate neighbourhood of the line, and within the liberal grant of land which the State had made—which specimens the Colonel showed us, in rather a careless way, as mere incidental advantages. But the eyes of Tom Harris and myself sparkled at the sight; for although we were not adepts in geology, we knew iron ore, and copper ore, and limestone, and hornblende, and fine marble, when we saw them; and visions of mines and quarries to be worked at vast profit, or leased for high rentals, flitted brilliantly before us. What wonder that, on hearing the generous terms on which the two American gentlemen were willing to admit us to a full participation of their advantages, Tom and I shook hands most heartily with Doctor and Colonel, and devoted ourselves from that moment to the establishment of the projected Company? And then Colonel Coriolanus rang the bell for lunch, and we all drank, over and over again, in creaming bumpers of Clicquot, prosperity and success to the Nauvoo and Nebraska Railway. Two day after, out came our prospectus to dazzle the City. A more flowery manifesto, or one more fertile in temptations, I have seldom seen. It proved, moreover, as plainly as that two and two make four, that the investment was as secure as the bank, if not more so, and a hundred-fold more remunerative. Never was there such a railway; never were there directors so opulent, so respectable, so conscientious, so experienced; never was there a line on which the expenses were so trifling, the traffic so enormous, or the dividend so princely, as that of the Nauvoo and Nebraska. Iowa was a State of boundless fertility, of inexhaustible resources—cereal, mineral, commercial. The line would be part of a main highway to the Far West, and the Old World and the New World pour tribute into the cornucopia of its matchless wealth. Cities were to spring up, fair and flourishing provinces were to blossom, where the virgin soil now awaited the spade and the ploughshare: we were to carry tobacco, madder, corn, cattle, immigrants, and ore. The gigantic fortunes we were to make were thrown into the shade by the benefits we were to confer on posterity and our contemporaries. Unborn millions were to canonise the projectors of the Grand Nauvoo and Nebraska; and we were not only to insure for ourselves the smiles and blessings of ages yet to come, but were to feather our nests pretty handsomely in a few short months. Not only were we to take rank as philanthropists of the first water, but to rig the market as well. Nor were the advantages of the new railroad confined to the eminent and clear-sighted capitalists who had first embarked in it. No; in that good cause the widow’s mite was welcome. Never, it was pointed out, was so admirable an opportunity offered to ladies of limited income, to struggling professional men, to decayed gentry or others, to double or treble their little store by means of the splendid dividends, the bonuses, premiums, and other good things, to be expected from the Company. Who has not read many such glowing proclamations as this, promising to realise the dreams of an El Dorado for the lucky speculator, bolstering up each statement by an imposing array of figures, and always concluding by the recommendation that (to prevent disappointment) immediate application be made at the office for shares? We had a secretary and cashier, and Dr Titus A. C. Bett was so kind as to undertake the latter responsible position; while the celebrated Wyldrake Flam, Esq., a gentleman who had been concerned with a good many companies in his time, was happily secured for the former situation. Sir George Gullings, M.P., a rich banker who had earned his baronetcy by his long course of voting for a Whig Ministry, was our chairman; and, of course, Tom Harris, Colonel Sling, and I, were among the managing directors. We took a great many shares amongst us; but, of course, by far the greater number were submitted to public competition, and the frequenters of the money market bit with tolerable freedom. But there were some wary old fish who refused so much as to nibble at the glittering bait, and foremost amongst them was old Muggins, that veteran stockbroker of whom Tom Harris had made mention at my table. Muggins was a character, and disagreeably outspoken. One day I met him at the Royal Exchange, and taking him playfully by the button, I asked him why he gave our Company the cold shoulder.