our walk uptown when the old moon-faced clock high up on the wall
above the stove pointed at four.

"I thought there was something up!" I cried. "What is it, Peter--
balance wrong?"

He did not answer, only waved his hand in reply, his bushy gray
eyebrows moving slowly, like two shutters that opened and closed,
as he scanned the lines of figures up and down, his long pen
gripped tight between his thin, straight lips, as a dog carries a
bone.

I never interrupt him when his brain is nosing about like this; it
is better to keep still and let him ferret it out. So I sat down
outside the curved rail with its wooden slats backed by faded
green curtains, close to the big stove screened off at the end of
the long room, fixed one eye on the moon-face and the other on the
ostrich egg, and waited.

There are no such banks at the present time--were no others then,
and this story begins not so very many years' ago--A queer, out-
of-date, mouldy old barn of a bank, you would say, this Exeter--
for an institution wielding its influence. Not a coat of paint for
half a century; not a brushful of whitewash for goodness knows how
much longer. As for the floor, it still showed the gullies and
grooves, with here and there a sturdy knot sticking up like a nut
on a boiler, marking the track of countless impatient depositors
and countless anxious borrowers, it may be, who had lock-stepped
one behind the other for fifty years or more, in their journey
from the outer door to the windows where the Peters of the old