Page:Tom Beauling (1901).pdf/194

 English expert, enjoying the shower-bath or one of the comfortable reading-chairs in the library. This library was quite a charming room. It was embellished with a Turner, a Corot—you looked out of deep forest into a meadow full of cow-slips—the portrait of Lady Ingoldsby by Gainsborough, some rare bronzes, and some two hundred thousand dollars' worth of early American books.

A big bull movement in the market terminated that May in a criminal struggle between two powerful factions for the control of a railroad in the Northwest. The prices for the securities involved reached fabulous quotations, but the rest of the market smashed, groveled, shrieked. Investment stocks as safe as the Bank of England went about asking people to take them for nothing. Money became scarcer than charity. The banks shut up like clams.

Now it happened—it usually did happen at similar times—that Mr. Dunbar was comfortably out of the market. So when prices shrank to absurdities he was