The Banker and the Bear

In quite another quarter of the city from the crowded thoroughfare where we first saw Dick, is another street, very different, but quite as interesting. It is narrow and dark; it does not celebrate the holiday time with gayly dressed shop windows; between the two black ranks of buildings that front on it, it is quite empty, save for alert policemen who patrol it, and the storm which has became ill natured as it whips angrily around corners. You may search as you will about this great city, but you will hardly find a spot more dismal, more chilling, more to be shunned on this jolly Christmas Eve. There is no doubt a dreariness of poverty, but the dreariness of wealth is worse; hidden, guarded, vaulted wealth, like that which lies behind these thick stone walls. For this street is the commercial heart of a great commercial city. And by day all about in the city and the country, in the great shops and office buildings and in the country store, men buy and sell, lend and borrow, without money, only with a faith in the wealth this cheerless street contains. Should it be destroyed, should the faith in it be shaken but for a day, unopened shutters would bear the bills of sheriffs' sales, and cold ashes would lie under the boilers of great factories. At night the heart stops beating, the crowds go away, and that which has been sent throbbing through the arteries of trade comes back to lie safely in thick steel chambers, where barred doors bear cunning locks that never sleep, but tick watchfully till morning.

Upon this street, squeezed in uncomfortably by two of the modern towers of Babel which our civilization seems to have made necessary, stands a thick, squat building of an older architecture, which might look rather imposing, did not its sky-scraping neighbors dwarf it to a mere notch between them. And in front of this building, which is, as you may have guessed, the home of Bagsbury and Company's Savings Bank, there drew up, at about eight o'clock on this Christmas Eve, a carriage. A footman clambered numbly from the box, opened the door, and helped old Mr. Bagsbury to extricate himself from his nest of rugs and furs; then he almost carried the old man across the wind-swept sidewalk and up the stairs, transferring him at the door to the care of Thomas Jones, the watchman.