[SEE ENGRAVING.]
Mr. Edwards Perley was not a man of wealth, although, at different periods of his life, he had been the owner of property valued at from one hundred thousand dollars to half a million. But this property being either in Texas land scrip, South Carolina gold mines, Western town lots, Mulberry trees, Maine wild lands, or other people’s promises to pay, Mr. Perley had never been able to realize what was so nearly a splendid fortune within his grasp. The revolution in Texas destroyed the value of Mexican grants, in which he had become largely interested, and the sale of square leagues of the “best cotton land in the world,” not only ceased suddenly, but the bills received for previous sales came back upon him dishonored. This was a sad damper on the golden hopes of the enthusiastic Mr. Edwards Perley. For a couple of years he had been selling land scrip from Bangor to New Orleans; and had been out on the Red River twice, during the time, with a surveying company, whose business it was to locate the little league-square lots. On these expeditions, he had become rather intimately acquainted with alligators and ague, and, on his return, deemed it no more than prudent to keep himself quiet until he regained his complexion, and the healthy roundness of his limbs and features. Mr. Perley worked hard in this matter; but it suited his temperament. He was no plodding genius, content to count sixpences first, then shillings, and so on until dollars began to appear. Not he. In that slow way to wealth he could not walk.
Just as Mr. Perley, who valued his property at hundreds of thousands of dollars in the present, and looked upon it as possessing an annually duplicating quality—just as Mr. Perley had selected a beautiful site for building a palace in New York, and had decided upon the plans submitted by a distinguished architect, the troubles in Texas destroyed the value of his scrip, and down he went to ruin like a collapsed balloon; and dozens of his confiding friends went with him.
But Mr. Edwards Perley had too much native buoyancy of character, too much hope in life, to be put down by ill-natured fortune after this summary manner. In the wreck and ruin in which he was involved, he managed to get hold of a plank on which to float ashore. With a few hundred dollars, which he had contrived to save, under a self-enacted “homestead exemption” law, he opened an exchange office in Wall street, on a very small scale. Though his business operations scarcely reached, for a time, the aggregate of hundreds per day, there were not a few of his acquaintances who believed his transactions to be limited only by thousands; and they were indebted to him for their ideas on the subject. Give a man the reputation of doing a large business, and business will be sure to come. So it was in the case of Edwards Perley. Talking and boasting were of great use to him. In a few years he was getting along, as the saying is, “swimmingly.” But, like the man who, after creeping along for a week in a stage-coach, grows impatient if the cars do not make thirty miles an hour instead of twenty, Mr. Perley, as soon as affairs became prosperous with him again, grew dissatisfied with what appeared a slow accumulation, and began to look around him for some good speculation. He was not long in finding what he sought.
But it is not our purpose to follow Mr. Perley through the various stages of his Carolina gold and Morus Multicaulis fevers; nor to minutely detail his operations in Western lands and town lots. As it had been in Texas land scrip, so it proved in all these. The visionary speculator, who sought wealth for its own sake, and was too eager for its possession to be willing to give back to society an equivalent of useful acts, after running a wild course for a few years, again tripped and fell. This time he found it much more difficult to recover himself. But with an elasticity of feeling that few possess, he went hopefully to work, and by dint of magnifying his own peculiar abilities, and his knowledge of business, induced a shrewd, calculating Yankee, who had a few thousand dollars, to join him in business.
For a year or two, Perley was content to move on slowly. After that, he grew ambitious and restless again. The fire had not burned out; it was only covered for a while. Of Jenkins, his partner, he had no very high opinion. He considered him a mere plodding genius, whose mind was in no way suggestive. He would do for a well beaten track, but for enterprise he was nobody. So he thought. But Jenkins had rather more shrewdness than his partner gave him credit for. He belonged to the class of men who think a great deal before they act, and who, therefore, rarely make mistakes in business matters. He understood Perley “like a book,” and was, therefore, prepared to counteract, judiciously, all his efforts that were not wisely directed. Reactions of this kind becoming, as business grew into importance, more and more frequent, Mr. Perley felt restless under them, and often lamented that affairs were not entirely under his own control.
This was the aspect of things when the golden news from California startled the most sober-minded with its tale of wonder. Perley believed every word of the first account, while Jenkins coolly took the liberty of doubting the whole story.
“It’s preposterous,” said he.
“But look at the official nature of the intelligence,” urged Perley.
