ever; their performance as vigorous and disastrous as at first.  The landed proprietor still redeemed, day after day, portions of his involved estate.  The schemer, disappointed in his expectations of a purchaser, returned to his speculation with redoubled ardour, and with fresh supplies of gold.  His only chance of ultimate recovery was to push boldly forward, and to betray no fear of failure.  One retrograde or timid step would open the eyes of men, and bring down ruin on the Pantamorphica.  Planner became conscious of all this to his dismay, and he had nothing to do in the very extremity of his distress, but to proceed in his venture with the best spirits he could command, and to trust himself fairly to the swelling tide.—­Allcraft looked on and trembled.

It is wonderful how long a withered leaf will sometimes cling to its branch.  It will hold tenaciously there, the last of its race, days after the decay of its greener and more healthy-looking mates.  “A creaking door,” the proverb has it, “hangs long upon its hinges;” and many a wheezing, parchment-looking gentleman, as we all know, who ought to have died every year of his life since he was born, draws his difficult breath through threescore years and ten; whilst the young, the hardy, and the sound are smitten in their pride, and fall in heaps about him.  It is no less strange that a house of business like that of our friend Mr Allcraft, should assert its existence for years, rotten as it was, during the whole of the time, at its very heart’s core.  And yet such is the case.  Eight years elapsed, and found it still in the land of the living:  yes, and to the eye external, as proper and as good a house of business as any you shall name.  Its vitals were going—­were gone, before the smallest indications of mischief appeared upon the surface.  Life must have been well nourished to maintain itself so long.  And was it not?  Answer, thou kind physician, gentle Margaret!  Answer, thou balm and life’s elixir—­Margaret’s gold!

Eight weary years have passed, and we have reached a miserable day in the month of November.  The wind is howling, and the rain is pelting against the parlour windows of the Banking-house, whose blinds are drawn close down.  The partners are all assembled.  Michael, whose hair is as grey as his father’s on the day of his death, and whom care and misery have made haggard and old, sits at a table, with a heap of papers before him, and a pen in his hand—­engaged, as it appears, in casting up accounts.  Mr Bellamy, who looks remarkably well—­very glossy and very fat—­sits at the table likewise, perusing leisurely the county newspapers through golden eyeglasses.  He holds them with the air of a gentleman, comfortable and at ease in all respects, mentally and bodily.  Augustus Theodore swings on a chair before the fire, which he keeps at work for his own especial consolation.  His feet stretch along the fender—­his amusement is the poker.  He has grown insufferably vain,