dit they implied, and a mere
glance at the price of a foreign loan conveyed to his appreciation a
more correct notion of a people than all the blue-books and all the
correspondence with plenipotentiaries.

These were not Culduffs views. His code--it is the code of all his
calling--was: No country of any pretensions, no more than any gentleman
of blood and family, ever became bankrupt. Pressed, hard-pushed, he
would say, Yes! we all of us have had our difficulties, and to surmount
them occasionally we are driven to make unprofitable bargains, but we
"rub through," and so will Greece and Spain and those other countries
where they are borrowing at twelve or twenty per cent, and raise a loan
each year to discharge the dividends.

Not only, then, were these two little gifted with qualities to render
them companionable to each other, but from the totally different way
every event and every circumstance presented itself to their minds, each
grew to conceive for the other a sort of depreciatory estimate as of
one who only could see a very small part of any subject, and even that
colored and tinted by the hues of his own daily calling.

"So, then," said Culduff, after listening to a somewhat lengthy
explanation from Bramleigh of why and how it was that there was nothing
to be done financially at the moment,--"so, then, I am to gather the
plan of a company to work the mines is out of the question?"

"I would rather call it deferred than abandoned," was the cautious
reply.

"In my career what we postpone we generally prohibit. And what other
course is open to us?"

"We can wait, my Lord, we can wait. Coal is not like indigo or tobacco;
it is not a question of hours--whether the crop be saved or ruined. We
can wait."

"Very true, sir; but _I_ cannot wait. There are some urgent calls upon
me just now, the men who are pressing which will not be so complaisant
as to wait either."

"I was always under the impression, my Lord, that your position as
a peer, and the nature of the services that you were engaged in, were
sufficient to relieve you from all the embarrassments that attach to
humbler men in difficulties?"

"They don't arrest, but they dun us, sir; and they dun with an
insistence and an amount of menace, too, that middle-class people can
form no conception of. They besiege the departments we serve under with
their vulgar complaints, and if the rumor gets abroad that one of us is
about to be advanced to a governorship