Amongst other transactions, I had been induced by my old friend Cutts, now in practice as an independent engineer, to apply for a large allocation of shares in the Slopperton Valley, a very spirited undertaking, for which the Saxon (as we used to call him) was engaged to invent the gradients. This occurred about the commencement of the great Potato Revolution—an event which I apprehend will be long remembered by the squirearchy and shareholders of these kingdoms. The money-market was beginning to exhibit certain symptoms of tightness; premiums were melting perceptibly away, and new schemes were in diminished favour. Under these circumstances, the Provisional Committee of the Slopperton Valley Company were beneficent enough to gratify my wishes to the full, and accorded to me the large privilege of three hundred original shares. Two months earlier this would have been equivalent to a fortune—as it was, I must own that my gratitude was hardly commensurate to the high generosity of the donors. I am not sure that I did not accompany the receipt of my letter of allocation with certain expletives by no means creditable to the character of the projectors—at all events, I began to look with a milder eye upon the atrocities of Pennsylvanian repudiation. However, as the crash was by no means certain, my sanguine temperament overcame me, and in a fit of temporary derangement I paid the deposit.
In the ensuing week the panic became general. Capel-court was deserted by its herd—Liverpool in a fearful state of commercial coma—Glasgow trembling throughout its Gorbals—and Edinburgh paralytically shaking. The grand leading doctrine of political economy once more was recognised as a truth: the supply exorbitantly exceeded the demand, and there were no buyers. The daily share-list became a far more pathetic document in my eyes than the Sorrows of Werter. The circular of my brokers, Messrs Tine and Transfer, contained a tragedy more woful than any of the conceptions of Shakespeare—the agonies of blighted love are a joke compared with those of baffled avarice; and of all kinds of consumption, that of the purse is the most severe. One circumstance, however, struck me as somewhat curious. Neither in share-list nor circular could I find any mention made of the Slopperton Valley. It seemed to have risen like an exhalation, and to have departed in similar silence. This boded ill for the existence of the £750 I had so idiotically invested, the recuperation whereof, in whole or in part, became the subject of my nightly meditations; and as correspondence in such matters is usually unsatisfactory, I determined to start personally in search of my suspended deposit.
I did not know a single individual of the Slopperton Provisional Committee, but I was well enough acquainted with Cutts, whose present residence was in a midland county of England, where the work of railway construction was going actively forward. As I drove into the town where the Saxon had established his headquarters, I saw with feelings of peculiar disgust immense gangs of cut-throat-looking fellows—“the navvies of the nations,” as Alfred Tennyson calls them—busy at their embankments, absorbing capital at an alarming ratio, and utterly indifferent to the state of the unfortunate shareholders then writhing under the pressure of calls. Philanthropy is a very easy thing when our own circumstances are prosperous, but a turn of the wheel of fortune gives a different complexion to our views. If I had been called upon two months earlier to pronounce an oration upon the vast benefits of general employment and high wages, I should have launched out con amore. Now, the spectacle which I beheld suggested no other idea than that of an enormous cheese fast hastening to decomposition and decay beneath the nibbling of myriads of mites.
I found Cutts in his apartment of the hotel in the unmolested enjoyment of a cigar. He seemed fatter, and a little more red in the gills, than when I saw him last, otherwise there was no perceptible difference.
“Hallo, old fellow!” cried the Saxon, pitching away a pile of estimates; “what the mischief has brought you up here? Waiter—a bottle of sherry! You wouldn’t prefer something hot at this hour of the morning, would you?”
“Certainly not.”
“Ay—you’re a married man now. How’s old Morgan? Lord! what fun we had at Shrewsbury when I helped you to your wife!”
“So far as I recollect, Mr Cutts, you nearly finished that business. But I want to have a serious talk with you about other matters. What has become of that confounded Slopperton Valley, for which you were engineer?”
“Slopperton Valley! Haven’t you heard about it? The whole concern was wound up about three weeks ago. Take a glass of wine.”
“Wound up? Why, this is most extraordinary. I never received any circular!”