Ole Man Benson awoke, therefore, to a scene of great discomfort, but upon such a date and with a prospect of so considerable an increase of fortune awaiting him upon that very day, he was the gayest of the company, and in spite of his years he shovelled away with the best of them, a-splendid-type-of-Anglo-Saxon-manhood. By one o’clock that noon the telegraph at last was working, and the first messages came through to the little depot; they concerned a riot in a local home for paralytics. Next, before two, news was conveyed of an outbreak of religious mania in the town of Omaha. It was not till a late hour in the evening that Ole Man Benson, waiting anxiously for the report of the great speech, heard the earliest tidings of the practical joke which Providence--in spite of Gen. Porfirio Diaz’ equable and masterly rule--had played him in the distant tropics. The same rapidity of thought which had enabled Theocritus to accumulate his vast fortune enabled him in that moment to perceive that he was ruined. Not indeed necessarily for ever,--he had known such things before--but at any rate in a manner sufficiently hefty to produce his immediate collapse. When, next morning, he could bring himself to read the papers, the disaster appeared before him in its exact proportions and tremendous scale. That speech, that statesman-like speech, had never been delivered--and for the best of reasons: Popocatapetl had unbosomed first! In the wild fall of prices nothing had done more to ruin the market than the heavy selling of agents acting on account of Theocritus C. Benson. There were dozens within the roaring walls of the building in Wall Street, thousands in the anxious streets without, who saw in the Benson selling yet another move of diabolical cunning proceeding from that Napoleonic brain. His agents had done their work thoroughly and well. They had anticipated his orders with such promptitude that no stock was left unsaleable upon their hands, and when, before the end of that black day, Popocatapetls were offering at the cost of haulage, they could proudly say that every interest of their client’s in the ruined concern had been disposed of. And Theocritus C. Benson, henceforward known as the Earthquake King, was left with no unsaleable paper upon his hands, but on the contrary with a solid cash result equivalent to at least three cents on the dollar of his yesterday’s fortune. This it is to be faithfully served in the intricacies of modern speculation! A truce to Ole Man Benson! If I have introduced his wretched commercial adventures at such length it is but to explain the portentous effect which they had upon the fortunes of one British statesman.