father.

But true to his principles he let his son go his own way. Indeed, he
helped him to a clerkship in the great Midland and Birmingham Joint
Stock Bank, of which his landlord, Sir Evelyn Merry, was chairman.

"Glad to get him," said the old baronet. "If he's half as good a man as
his father he'll do well."

The boy started at a local branch, and in a year was transferred to the
central office at Birmingham.

There he spent his spare time attending evening classes. At the end of a
year he held a certificate, was entitled to put certain letters after
his name, and had written an article on bullion which appeared in the
_Banker's Magazine_ and was translated into German.

By the time he was thirty he was a manager, and ten years later he was
one of the managing directors of the second biggest Joint Stock Bank in
the richest country in the world.

And he did not stop there. George Silver was a financier in the great
style, and a superlatively honest one. He had the initiative, the
knowledge, and above all the judgment that made some men call him the
Napoleon of Threadneedle Street. At forty-five he launched the Union
Bank of Brazil and Uruguay; and to that colossal undertaking he devoted
the last twenty-five years of his strenuous and successful life.

In the City he was known thereafter as Brazil Silver.

The Bank was his passion and his life.

When at fifty, to the astonishment of many, he married, the City merely
said:

"He must have an heir to carry on the Bank."

Mrs. Silver was a semi-aristocratic woman of limited intelligence,
suppressed ambition, and sound limbs. It was the latter characteristic
which won her a husband. He was not such a bad judge of make and shape
as his father would have had the world believe; and as usual Brazil
Silver's judgment proved good. In the appointed time his wife fulfilled
her function, and gave him the son he asked of her.

CHAPTER XII

The Eton Man

Jim Silver grew up neither his father's son nor his mother's.

"He's a throw-back--to his grandfather," said old Sir Evelyn.

And in fact from the first the lad's soul hankered after the broad lands
of Leicestershire rather than the counting-house in Threadneedle Street.

His happiest days were spent as a child on his grand-dad's farm, amid
the great horses, and sweet-breathed kine, and golden stacks.

"Back to the land," as his grandfather was fond of saying, was the
child's unspoken motto.

The old m