lkins.

"It is not thought," said the _Herald_, "that the failures will carry
down any other concerns. The run on the First National Bank was one of
those panicky symptoms which are dangerous because so unreasoning. It is
to be hoped that it will not be renewed in the morning. The banks are
not involved in the operations of the Grain Belt Trust Company, the
failure of which, it must be admitted, is sure to cause serious
disturbances, both locally and elsewhere, wherever its wide-spread
operations have extended."

The physical system adjusts itself to any permanent lesion in the body,
and finally ceases even to send out its complaining messages of pain. So
we in Lattimore, who a few weeks ago had been ready to sacrifice
anything for the keeping of our good name; who by stealth justly
foreclosed mortgages justly due, lest the world should wonder at their
nonpayment; who so greatly had rejoiced in our own strength; who had
felt that, surely, we who had wrought such wonders could not now
fail:--even we numbly came to regard receiverships and assignments as
quite the thing to be expected. The fact that, all over the country,
panic, ruin, and business stagnation were spreading like a pestilence,
from just such centers of contagion as Lattimore, made it easier for
us. Surely, we felt, nobody could justly blame us for being in the path
of a tempest which, like a tropic cyclone, ravaged a continent.

This may have been weak self-justification; but, even yet, when I think
of the way we began, and how the wave of "prosperity" rose and rose, by
acts in themselves, so far as we could see, in every way praiseworthy;
how with us, and with people engaged in like operations everywhere, the
most powerful passions of society came to aid our projects; how the
winds from the unknown, the seismic throbbings of the earth, and the
very stars in their courses fought for us; and when, at last, these
mightinesses turned upon us the cold and evil eye of their displeasure,
how the heaped-up sea came pouring over here, trickling through there,
and seeping under yonder, until our great dike toppled over in baleful
tumult, "and all the world was in the sea"; how business, east, west,
north, and south, went paralyzed with fear and distrust, and old
concerns went out like strings of soap-bubbles, and shocks of pain and
disease went round the world, and everywhere there was that hellish and
portentous thing known to the modern world only, and called a