eadily increasing its
earnings in spite of this blamed panic."

"You worked regeneration, General, as I've often told you."

"Well, I'm too old to see what it's coming to. I hope a good man will
step into my place after I'm gone. I'm sometimes sorry you didn't stick
by me, Ben."

He spoke of the great road in a tone of regretful sentiment which I had
never found in his allusions to his lost Matoaca. The romance of his
life, after all, was not a woman, but a railroad, and his happiest
memory was, I believe, not the Sunday upon which he had stood beside the
rose-lined bonnet of his betrothed and sung lustily out of the same
hymn-book, but the day when the stock of the Great South Midland and
Atlantic had sold at 180 in the open market.

"I'll tell you what, my boy," he remarked with a quiver of his lower
lip, which hung still farther away from his bloodless gum, "a woman may
go back on you, and the better the woman the more likely she is to do
it,--but a road won't,--no, not if it is a good road."

"Well, I'm not getting much return out of the West Virginia and Wyanoke
just now," I replied. "It's no fun being a little road at the mercy of a
big one when the big one is a boa constrictor. Even if you get a fair
division of the rates, you don't get your cars when you want them."

"The moral of that," returned the General, with a chuckle, "is, to quote
from my poor old mammy again, 'Don't hatch until you're ready to hatch
whole.'"

We parted with a laugh, and I dismissed the affairs of the little
railroad as I entered my office at the bank, where my private wire
immediately ticked off the news of a state of panic in the money market.
That was in February, and it was not until the end of March that the ice
on which I was walking cracked under my feet and I went through.

CHAPTER XXIV

IN WHICH I GO DOWN

I had just risen from breakfast on the last day of March when I was
called to the telephone by Cummins, the cashier of the bank.

"Things are going pretty queer down here. Looks as if a run were
beginning. Some old fool started it after reading about that failure of
the Darlington Trust Company in New York. Wish you'd hurry."

"Call up the directors, and look here!--pay out all deposits slowly
until I get there."

The telephone rang off, and picking up my hat, I went down the front
steps to the carriage, which had been ordered by Sally for an early
appointment. As I stepped in, she appeared in her hat a