ooves, 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 days, and the Peter of the present, presided over the
funds entrusted to their care.

Well enough in its day, you might have said, with a shrug, as you looked
over its forlorn interior. Well enough in its day! Why, man, old John
Astor, James Beekman, Rhinelander Stewart, Moses Grinnell, and a lot of
just such worthies--men whose word was as good as their notes--and
whose notes were often better than the Government's, presided over its
destinies, and helped to stuff the old-fashioned vault with wads of
gilt-edged securities--millions in value if you did but know it--and
making it what it is to-day. If you don't believe the first part of my
statement, you've only to fumble among the heap of dusty ledgers piled
on top of the dusty shelves; and if you doubt the latter part, then try
to buy some of the stock and see what you have to pay for it. Although
the gas was turned off in the directors' room, I could still see
from where I sat the very mahogany table under which these same
ruffle-shirted, watch-fobbed, snuff-taking old fellows tucked their
legs when they decided on who should and who should not share the bank's
confidence.

And the side walls and surroundings were none the less shabby and quite
as dilapidated. Even the windows had long since given up the fight
to maintain a decent amount of light, and as for the grated opening
protected by iron shutters which would have had barely room to swing
themselves clear of the building next door, no Patrick past or present
had ever dared loosen their bolts for a peep even an inch wide into the
canyon below, so gruesome was the collection of old shoes, tin cans,
broken bottles and battered hats which successive generations had
hurried into the narrow un-get-at-able space that lay between the two
structures.

Indeed the only thing inside or out of this time-worn building which the
most fertile of imaginations could consider as being at all up to date
was the clock. Not its face--that was old-timey enough with its sun,
moon and stars in blue and gold, and the name of the Liverpool maker
engraved on its enamel; nor its hands, fiddle-shaped and stiff, nor
its case