We bad put them down as follows: Cash in
banker's hands, one hundred and sixty-five
pounds; good debts, two hundred and fifty
thousand pounds; doubtful ditto, six thousand
pounds; bad ditto, one hundred and ten thousand
pounds. At first this statement appeared
plausible. enough, but upon a little investigation
it was shown to be utterly rotten: so much so
that our real available assets were reduced to the
hundred and sixty-five pounds we had had the
decency to leave at our banker's when we stopped
payment. If our good and doubtful debts had
been such as we described them, we should have
been able to pay something like eight or ten
shillings in the pound; but the former
consisted almost entirely of bills which various
shaky Greek firms had accepted on our account,
and the latter were composed of money owed us
by firms which had already failed.

As a matter of course, a meeting of our
creditors was called, and—equally as a matter
of course—anger was displayed on this occasion
by those who held our dishonoured bills. We
tried hard to throw the blame of the whole
affair upon our Odessa house, which, we said, had
engaged in certain rash speculations without our
consent, and, by stopping payment during a
mercantile crisis, had obliged us to follow suit.
Odessa was a convenient place in which to call
our scapegoat into existence. It is a town very
far off, and one in which to make inquiries
would take up more time and cost more money
than London business men cared to expend.
Moreover, we had been wise in our generation,
and had distributed our favours—that is our
bills—very impartially over the commercial
world. With the exception of the Onyx Bank,
of which Mr. Velardi was a director, and of the
Discount Company, at whose board I had a seat,
no single firm lost more than from a thousand to
fifteen hundred pounds by our failure. Our
creditors were many, but none of them were
very heavy losers; and, of those that belonged
to London, nearly all could fall back upon some
foreign indorser of the bills they held. Moreover,
we had been true to our nationality—
that is, to the nationality of our head partner—
and had not "let in" any Greek firm, except
such as, being already on the verge of
insolvency, were rather pleased than otherwise at an
excuse for having a good whitewash, and of
throwing the blame on us.

The Onyx Bank and the Discount Company
had been hit very hard indeed, but we knew
full well that they would never appear in
judgment against us. Establishments of the kind
find it much more judicious, and quite as profitable,
not to throw good money after bad, and
never publish to the world the losses they have
had in business. Directors, managers, and
secretaries of public companies, have a very
firmly established creed about making known all
their gains, but hiding as much as possible any
mistakes they may make. In our case, it was,
so to speak, doubly politic that what they had
lost through our suspension should not be too
widely published, inasmuch as in both
companies members of our firm had sat at the board,
and must have sanctioned, if not advocated,
loans or discounts which, though they helped
our house to tide over affairs for a time, in the
end only entailed much greater losses upon the
shareholders of both concerns. When we stopped
payment it was said upon the Stock Exchange
that the Onyx Bank had lost somewhere about
thirty thousand pounds by us, and the Discount
Company a still larger sum. These were of
course exaggerations, and so soon as they were
discovered to be so, a reaction took place, and it
was reported that the losses we had occasioned
had been a mere nothing. The directors of the
two establishments knew this to be false, but
did not contradict it, and the value of shares in
both concerns—having first fallen much more
than they ought to have done on account of our
failure—now rose to a higher price than was at
all reasonable. But it is almost always thus in
business London. Whenever it is known at first
that any joint-stock company has lost money,
the amount is greatly exaggerated, and the
shares of the concern fall. Then the untruth
of the tale becomes known, and a reaction more
absurd than the previous fall in prices takes
place. It is wonderful how very like children
in some respects the keenest and most knowing
men of business are.

Our chief object was, of course, to gain
time. The first anger of creditors always passes
away, and the more violent the whirlwind
the sooner it is ended. We had to meet a
torrent of abuse from some few English
creditors, but we soon smoothed matters by saying
that we hoped to make an offer to compound our
debts by paying so much in the pound, on
condition of our not being gazetted as bankrupts;
and that we required a little time in order to
gather together what money we could, and see
what there was to divide among those to whom
we were indebted. In the mean time we proposed
that a committee of three should be named by
the general body of our creditors, these three
gentlemen being themselves creditors, and that
two months' time be given us: in order that—
under the inspection of this committee—fuller
accounts might be prepared, and a more detailed
statement of our affairs drawn up.

To a proposition so fair and aboveboard
no objection could be made, and at the first
meeting of our creditors the terms and conditions
we had proposed were agreed to. In the
mean time we took great care to hint more
than to promise, that we hoped to pay at least
ten shillings in the pound. This put our creditors
in good humour, and those who were
present at the meeting at once proceeded to
name three of their number to investigate our
affairs. Few were willing, and none anxious,
to be troubled with the business, and so the
first three gentlemen whose names were—by
previous arrangement with ourselves—proposed,
were at once named members. One of these
was a man whose name stood very high in the
commercial world, but who had so very much
to attend to in his own affairs that we felt sure