University of Virginia Library

32. CHAPTER XXXII.

All too soon came the period when I must part with
my pleasant neighbour Mrs. Rivers, the opening brilliancy
of whose lot seemed to threaten a lasting separation,
from those whose way led rather through the
“cool, sequestered vale,” so much praised, and so little
coveted.

Mr. Rivers had for some time found abundant
leisure for his favourite occupations of hunting and
fishing. The signing of bills took up but little time,
and an occasional ride to the scene of future glories,
for the purpose of superintending the various improvements,
was all that had necessarily called him
away. But now, final preparations for a removal were
absolutely in progress; and I had begun to feel really
sad at the thought of losing the gentle Anna, when the
Bank Commissioners again paced in official dignity
up Main-street, and, this time, alighted at Mr. Rivers'
door.

The President and Greenhorn had trotted to Tinkerville
that morning, and the old gentleman was not in
town; so our men of power gravely wended their way

towards the newly-painted and pine-pillared honours
of the Merchants' and Manufacturers' Banking-house,
not without leaving behind them many a surmise as to
the probable object of this new visitation.

It was Mr. Skinner's opinion, and Mr. Skinner is a
long-headed Yankee, that the Bank had issued too
many bills; and for the sincerity of his judgment, he
referred his hearers to the fact, that he had for some
time been turning the splendid notes of the Merchants'
and Manufacturers' Bank of Tinkerville into wheat
and corn as fast as he conveniently could.

A sly old farmer, who had sold several hundred
bushels of wheat to Mr. Skinner, at one dollar twenty-five
cents a bushel, winked knowingly as the merchant
mentioned this proof of his own far-seeing astuteness;
and informed the company that he had paid out the
last dollar long ago on certain outstanding debts.

Mr. Porter knew that the Tinkerville blacksmith
had run up a most unconscionable bill for the iron
doors, &c. &c., which were necessary to secure the
immense vaults of the Bank; that would give, as he
presumed, some hint of the probable object of the Commissioners.

Mr. Simeon Jenkins, if not the greatest, certainly
the most grandiloquent man in Montacute, did 'nt want
to know any better than he did know, that the Cashier
of the Bank was a thick-skull; and he felt very much
afraid that the said Cashier had been getting his principals
into trouble. Mr. Bite's manner of writing his
name was, in Mr. Jenkins' view, proof positive of his
lack of capacity; since “nobody in the universal

world” as Mr. Jenkins averred, “ever wrote such a
hand as that, that know'd any thing worth knowing.”

But conjectures, however positively advanced, are,
after all, not quite satisfactory; and the return of the
commissioners was most anxiously awaited even by the
very worthies who knew their business so well.

The sun set most perversely soon, and the light
would not stay long after him; and thick darkness
settled upon this mundane sphere, and no word transpired
from Tinkerville. Morning came, and with it
the men of office, but oh! with what lengthened faces!

There were whispers of “an injunction”—horrid
sound!—upon the Merchants' and Manufacturers' Bank
of Tinkerville.

To picture the dismay which drew into all sorts of
shapes the universal face of Montacute, would require
a dozen Wilkies. I shall content myself with saying
that there was no joking about the matter.

The commissioners were not very communicative,
but in spite of their dignified mystification, something
about broken glass and tenpenny nails did leak out before
their track was fairly cold.

And where was Harley Rivers? “Echo answers,
where!” His dear little wife watered her pillow with
her tears for many a night before he returned to Montacute.

It seemed, as we afterwards learned, that the commissioners
had seen some suspicious circumstances
about the management of the Bank, and returned with
a determination to examine into matters a little more
scrupulously. It had been found in other cases that
certain “specie-certificates” had been locomotive. It

had been rumoured, since the new batch of Banks had
come into operation, that
ready to effect at short notice certain transfers of assets
and specie. And in the course of the Tinkerville investigation
the commissioners had ascertained by the
aid of hammer and chisel, that the boxes of the “real
stuff” which had been so loudly vaunted, contained a
heavy charge of broken glass and tenpenny nails,
covered above and below with half-dollars, principally
“bogus.” Alas! for Tinkerville, and alas, for poor
Michigan!

The distress among the poorer classes of farmers
which was the immediate consequence of this and other
Bank failures, was indescribable. Those who have seen
only a city panic, can form no idea of the extent and
severity of the sufferings on these occasions. And
how many small farmers are there in Michigan who
have not suffered from this cause?

The only adequate punishment which I should prescribe
for this class of heartless adventurers, would be
to behold at one glance all the misery they have occasioned;
to be gifted with an Asmodean power, and
forced to use it. The hardiest among them, could
scarcely, I think, endure to witness the unroofing of
the humble log-huts of Michigan, after the bursting of
one of these Dead-sea apples. Bitter indeed were the
ashes which they scattered!

How many settlers who came in from the deep
woods many miles distant where no grain had yet

grown, after travelling perhaps two or three days and
nights, with a half-starved ox-team, and living on a few
crusts by the way, were told when they offered their
splendid-looking bank-notes, their hard-earned all, for
the flour which was to be the sole food of wife and
babes through the long winter, that these hoarded treasures
were valueless as the ragged paper which wrapped
them! Can we blame them if they cursed in their
agony, the soul-less wretches who had thus drained
their best blood for the furtherance of their own schemes
of low ambition? Can we wonder that the poor,
feeling such wrongs as these, learn to hate the rich,
and to fancy them natural enemies?

Could one of these heart-wrung beings have been
introduced, just as he was, with the trembling yet in
his heart, and the curses on his lips, into the gilded
saloon of his betrayer, methinks the dance would have
flagged, the song wavered, the wine palled, for the moment
at least.

But the uninvited presence of the involuntary pay-master,
would have been “the hand on the wall” to
many a successful (!) banker.

After public indignation had in some measure subsided,
and indeed such occurrences as I have described
became too common to stir the surface of society very
rudely, Mr. Harley Rivers returned to Montacute, and
prepared at once for the removal of his family. I
took leave of his wife with most sincere regret, and I
felt at the time as if we should never meet again. But

I have heard frequently from them until quite lately;
and they have been living very handsomely (Mr.
Rivers always boasted that he would live like a gentleman)
in one of the Eastern cities on the spoils of the
Tinkerville Wild-cat.