To provide that credit, the banks widened their operations, increased, on the security of stocks ever rising in value, their over-drafts, issued batch after batch of fresh notes. The most cautious admitted that accommodation must keep step with trade; and the huge strides which this was making, the changed conditions, the wider outlook, the calling in of the new world to augment the wealth of the old—all seemed to demand an advance which promised to be as profitable as it was warranted. To the ordinary eye the sun of prosperity shone in an unclouded sky. Even the experienced, though they scanned the heavens with care, saw nothing to dismay them. Only here and there an old fogey whose memory went back to the crisis of ’93, or to the famous Black Monday of twenty years earlier, uttered a note of warning; or some mechanical clerk, of the stamp of Rodd, sunk in a rut of routine, muttered of Accommodation Bills where his employer saw only legitimate trade. But their croakings, feeble at best, were lost in the joyous babble of an Exchange, enriched by commissions, and drunk with success. It was a new era. It was the age of gold. It was the fruit of conditions long maturing. Men’s labor, aided by machinery, was henceforth to be so productive that no man need be poor, all might be rich. Experts, reviewing the progress which had been made and the changes which had been wrought during the last fifty years, said these things; and the vulgar took them up and repeated them. The Bank of England acted as if they were true. The rate of discount was low. And while all men thus stretched out their hands to catch the golden manna Aldersbury was not idle. The appetite for gain grows by what it feeds upon and Aldersbury appetites had been whetted by early successes in their own field. The woollen mills, sharing in the general prosperity of the last two years, had done well, and more than one mill had changed hands at unheard-of prices. The Valleys were said to be full of money which, or part of it, trickled into the town, improving a trade already brisk. Many had made large gains by outside speculations and had boasted of them. Report had multiplied their profits, others had joined in and they too had gained, and their gains had fired the greed of their neighbors. Some had followed up their first successes. Others prepared to extend their businesses, built new premises, put in new-fangled glass windows, and by their action gave an impetus to subordinate trades, and spread still farther the sense of well-being. On the top of all this had come the Valleys Railroad Scheme, backed by Ovington’s Bank, and offering to everyone a chance of speculating on his door-step: a scheme which while it appealed to local pride, had a specious look of safety, since the railway was to be built under the shareholders’ own eyes, across the fields they knew, and by men whom they saw going in and out every day.