The Romance of a Plain Man by Ellen Glasgow

The panic which had begun with the depositors of small accounts, spread next day to the holders of larger ones, and even while I stood at my window and watched the cash brought in in bags through the cheering crowd on the sidewalk, I knew that the quarter of a million dollars would go down with the rest. My financial insight had misled me, and the bank funds, which I had believed so carefully guarded, had suffered the same fate as my private fortune. There were more serious questions behind the immediate need of currency, and these questions drummed in my mind now, dull and regular as the beat of a hammer.

For three days we paid off our accounts, and at the end of that time, when I left the building, after the run had stopped, it seemed to me that the city had a deserted and trampled look, as if some enormous picnic had been held in the streets. A few loose shreds of paper, a banana peel here and there, the ends of numerous cigars, and the white patch torn from a woman's petticoat littered the pavement. Over all there was a thick coating of dust, and the wind, blowing straight from the east, whipped swirls of it into our faces, as the General and I drove slowly up-town in his buggy.