The next day we went for a drive to Windsor, and were to dine at a famous old roadside inn. On arriving we, of course, visited the castle, and, while viewing the decorations in the stately throne room, Mac stopped us with the remark that something I had said the day before had been sticking in his mind. He went on to say that we wanted a hundred thousand apiece in order to return home in good shape; that the Bank of England had plenty to spare, and it was well for the lightning to strike where the balances were heavy. The bank would never miss the money, and he firmly believed the whole directorate of the fossil institution was permeated with the dry rot of centuries. The managers were convinced that their banking system was impregnable, and, as a consequence, it would fall an easy victim, provided, as we suspected, the bank was really managed by hereditary officials. Here was a picture, indeed. Three American adventurers, two of them barely past their majority, standing in the throne room of Windsor Castle, and plotting to strike a blow at the money bags of the Bank of England! The idea grew on us rapidly. After dinner we sat in the twilight of that old inn and discussed the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street from a point of view from which she had probably never been discussed before. I can imagine with what scorn the idiotically puffed and bepuffed magnates of the bank would have regarded us had they known of our discussion. They afterwards boasted to me, as they had boasted for a century, that their system was perfect, and as a proof that it was so they widely proclaimed they had not changed it in a hundred years. They had proclaimed so loudly and so long its absolute invulnerability that they not only believed it themselves, but all the world had come to believe it as well. "Safe as the bank" was a proverb everywhere underlying the English tongue. In our discussion we speedily came to the conclusion that any system of finance unchanged in detail for a century, belief in the perfection of which was an article of faith not alone with the officials charged with its management, but with the people of England at large, must, in the very nature of the case, lie wide open to the attack of any man bold enough to doubt its impregnability and resolute to attack. What a figment of the imagination this boasted impregnability of the Bank of England was the sequel will show. And as for those masters of finance, those earthly Joves of the financial world who sat serene above the clouds, "the Governor and Company of the Bank of England," they soon had the whole money world shaking with laughter when they stood revealed the Simple Simons they proved to be.