Over what a curious succession of scenes and pageants has that gilt Grasshopper presided! Visits of kings and queens, now dressed in one way, now another, now riding on horseback, now drawn in great gilt carriages, now gliding silently in motor cars; proclamations of war and peace, the nation once your friend now your enemy, once your enemy now your friend! The Bank of England was not built when the Grasshopper was first lifted to its place, and where the Mansion House now stands, the cattle lowed in the Stock Market. Endow for a moment that Grasshopper with life and recollection! It has seen London spread out in an almost unimaginable growth. The sails upon the river have given place to the chimney stack, and the quiet nights of other days are now broken by the hooting of syrens. And it heard in 1914 the tramp of London men drilling upon the Gresham hone stones to fit themselves for war. We may hope that for a century at least it will hear that sound no more. PART II. THE BUSINESS CHAPTER IV. THE SOUTH SEA BUBBLE AND THE BIRTH OF THE ROYAL EXCHANGE ASSURANCE CORPORATION. To get rich quick in the shortest possible space of time with the least possible expenditure of effort is a natural ambition. To a man we want to acquire riches, and at all events when we are young we encourage a secret hope that we shall wake up on some glorious morning to find we have achieved them. So much of honourable ambition presumes wealth as its starting-point. With the most of us, however, the hope is kept secret--a dream to be played with rather than a definite project to be realised. But every now and then the hope breaks its bounds and spreads with the rapidity and the violence of a contagion, from man to man, and from woman to woman. There have been several periods during which the contagion has raged. Many will remember the autumn of the year which ended with the Jameson Raid. In those months women were almost as conspicuous as men in Throgmorton Street. Dealers in South African securities would buy in the morning and sell in the afternoon and put any sum up to £10,000 in their pockets as a consequence. But the fever has never exhibited itself in so virulent and blatant a degree as during the second decade of the 18th Century--a decade made famous by the South Sea Bubble.