Meanwhile the storm in the City was raging, and spreading far away to all points of the compass. Though the moon shone forth calmly, on Cornhill and Lombard-street, on Threadneedle-street and on the Stock Exchange, through all the night the storm raged in men’s hearts; it tossed men and women on their beds, and shook giants of finance where they lay sleepless and afeared: it tore along the railways, sealed up in letters, which carried the tempest to Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Bristol, Birmingham, and even to the cathedral city where Mr. Phillips resided. They were like so many Pandora’s boxes, these letters from the City the next morning, letting out on being opened evils without end. Despair and ruin were in many of them, and all the country was agitated with fear. If an invading host had been sailing up the Thames, the consternation would not have been so great; for the people could have gone forth and done battle with the foe. But there is no fighting a financial storm,--no contending with Stock Exchange terrors. After the arrival of Pandora’s letters, there went forth into the country flights of telegrams,--electric pigeons which settled in crowds with their missives in all the towns of England, and the storm increased tenfold with the excitement of the electric current. During the morning hundreds of bulls put on bear’s clothing, and the shares of Overton, Baker, & Co., began to fall; and in the afternoon the leading discount-house in the country gave way to the pressure: and then fresh flights of electric pigeons went forth into the towns that Overton, Baker, & Co., had failed for ten millions of money. You may fancy that this panic bears a strong likeness to the one which has only recently occurred. Panics are closely akin, and therefore much alike. If the crash of 1866 enables you the better to realise that which forms part of the present history, so much the better. Thomas Dibble will never forget in which panic he lost his wife’s five hundred pounds, and how he suffered by his mad efforts to replace the money. CHAPTER XIV. ARTHUR PHILLIPS AT WORK. He sat near the trunk of an oak-tree, and a brook made murmuring music amongst the gnarled and grey and knotty old roots. There were big burdock-leaves at his feet, trailing brambles full of luscious fruit, and thick brown and yellow grasses. Beneath the branches of the tree, on one side, there was a peep of distant tender hills, with a foreground of foliage just tinted with autumnal touches of red and yellow. He sat in the shadow of a clump of grand old Severnshire elms, and on his right at some distance a number of farm labourers were stacking wheat.