From this time his trust in commerce became impaired. Hitherto he had considered it the surest road to wealth, because it had borne him safely on to prosperity. But now he hesitated and reconsidered the matter over and over again, when proceeding to send out a ship, and thought with doubt and anxiety about the result, after she had spread her white sails to the breeze, and started on her voyage to distant lands. This uncertain state of mind continued, until Mr. Townsend began to think of some other mode of using his capital less likely to be attended with loss. He had been raised in the counting-room of a shipping merchant; had sailed ten voyages while a young man, as supercargo, and was now, from twenty five years active devotion to business, thoroughly conversant with every thing appertaining to commerce with foreign countries. As a shipper he was at home. But although, like other men of his class, he had a general and pretty accurate notion of the operations of trade, he had no practical knowledge of any branch but his own. A few years before, he had said that any man who, after ten or twenty years successful devotion to any business, was silly enough to change it for another, of which he knew little or nothing, deserved to lose, as he stood ten chances to one of losing all he had made. And yet, notwithstanding all this, in the darkness and doubt that had come over his mind, Mr. Townsend had serious thoughts of directing his capital into some other business. This important crisis in the merchant’s affairs occurred during a period when every thing was inflated, and speculation rife. In his younger days he had made, in one season, by speculating in cotton, twenty thousand dollars; and, on another occasion, ten thousand dollars in a single day, by operating in flour. Fortunes were lost at the time, but he had been wise enough to stop at the right moment. Rumors of this one having made twenty or thirty thousand dollars, and the other one fifty or one hundred thousand, in the course of a few months, were floating through all the circles of trade, and inspiring men who had never made a dollar in their lives, except in regular trade, to stake their fortunes on little better than the turn of a die. The whole commercial atmosphere was filled with the miasmata of speculation, and all men who inhaled it became more or less infected with the disease. Property, estimated for years at a certain price, suddenly changed hands at an advance and again at, perhaps, double the original price paid for it. Why it had become so much more valuable all at once, nobody could clearly explain, although reasons for it were given that appeared to be taken for granted as true. A lot of ground that the owner would have taken a thousand dollars for, and been glad to have got it, all at once became worth two or three thousand dollars, and was sold for that sum; and, in the course of a month or two, perhaps, was resold for five or six thousand, on the rumor of a