soberly down to his counting-house--humming a stave or two of 'Spanish
Ladies', perhaps, under his breath. Manderson would allow himself the harmless
satisfaction, as soon as the time for action had gone by, of pointing out to
some Rupert of the markets a coup worth a million to the depredator might
have been made. 'Seems to me,' he would say almost wistfully, 'the Street is
getting to be a mighty dull place since I quit.' By slow degrees this amiable
weakness of the Colossus became known to the business world, which exulted
greatly in the knowledge.

At the news of his death panic went through the markets like a hurricane; for
it came at a luckless time. Prices tottered and crashed like towers in an
earthquake. For two days Wall Street was a clamorous inferno of pale despair.
All over the United States, wherever speculation had its devotees, went a waft
of ruin, a plague of suicide. In Europe also not a few took with their own
hands lives that had become pitiably linked to the destiny of a financier whom
most of them had never seen. In Paris a well-known banker walked quietly out
of the Bourse and fell dead upon the broad steps among the raving crowd of
Jews, a phial crushed in his hand. In Frankfort one leapt from the Cathedral
top, leaving a redder stain where he struck the red tower. Men stabbed and
shot and strangled themselves, drank death or breathed it as the air, because
in a lonely corner of England the life had departed from one cold heart vowed
to the service of greed.

The blow could not have fallen at a more disastrous moment. It came when Wall
Street was in a condition of suppressed 'scare'-suppressed, because for a week
past the great interests known to act with or to be actually controlled by the
Colossus had been desperately combating the effects of the sudden arrest of
Lucas Hahn, and the exposure of his plundering of the Hahn banks. This
bombshell, in its turn, had fallen at a time when the market had been
'boosted' beyond its real strength. In the language of the place, a slump was