“I am a bear of everything German and French.  Sell, sell, sell, keep on selling.”

For a moment Warner hesitated.  What could Worlington Dodds know at Dunsloe which was not known in Throgmorton Street?  But he remembered the quickness and decision of his partner.  He would not have sent such a message without very good grounds.  If he was to act at all he must act at once, so, hardening his heart, he went down to the house, and, dealing upon that curious system by which a man can sell what he has not got, and what he could not pay for if he had it, he disposed of heavy parcels of French and German securities.  He had caught the market in one of its little spasms of hope, and there was no lack of buying until his own persistent selling caused others to follow his lead, and so brought about a reaction.  When Warner returned to his offices it took him some hours to work out his accounts, and he emerged into the streets in the evening with the absolute certainty that the next settling-day would leave him either hopelessly bankrupt or exceedingly prosperous.

It all depended upon Worlington Dodds’s information.  What could he possibly have found out at Dunsloe?

And then suddenly he saw a newspaper boy fasten a poster upon a lamp-post, and a little crowd had gathered round it in an instant One of them waved his hat in the air; another shouted to a friend across the street.  Warner hurried up and caught a glimpse of the poster between two craning heads—­

“FRANCE DECLARES WAR ON GERMANY.”

“By Jove!” cried Warner.  “Old Dodds was right, after all.”

THE KING OF THE FOXES

It was after a hunting dinner, and there were as many scarlet coats as black ones round the table.  The conversation over the cigars had turned, therefore, in the direction of horses and horsemen, with reminiscences of phenomenal runs where foxes had led the pack from end to end of a county, and been overtaken at last by two or three limping hounds and a huntsman on foot, while every rider in the field had been pounded.  As the port circulated the runs became longer and more apocryphal, until we had the whips inquiring their way and failing to understand the dialect of the people who answered them.  The foxes, too, became mere eccentric, and we had foxes up pollard willows, foxes which were dragged by the tail out of horses’ mangers, and foxes which had raced through an open front door and gone to ground in a lady’s bonnet-box.  The master had told one or two tall reminiscences, and when he cleared his throat for another we were all curious, for he was a bit of an artist in his way, and produced his effects in a crescendo fashion.  His face wore the earnest, practical, severely accurate expression which heralded some of his finest efforts.

“It was before I was master,” said he.  “Sir Charles Adair had the hounds at that time, and then afterwards they passed to old Lathom, and then to me.  It may possibly have been just after Lathom took them over, but my strong impression is that it was in Adair’s time.  That would be early in the seventies—­about seventy-two, I should say.