the dining-out wit of the nineteenth century
is the successor of the king's or baron's jester
of the feudal ages, and enjoys similar
privileges. Just after he was knighted he never
tired of hearing himself called Sir Henry,
and a town wit once called out to him from
the bottom of the mahogany table:

"Sir Henry?"

"Well."

"You have now, Sir Henry, an excellent
excuse for being made a baronet."

"What is that? " asked Dazzlem much
flattered.

"You are already a knight."

Nobody liked the joke better than Sir
Henry Dazzlem, whose imagination was
always metamorphosing his knighthood into
a baronetcy, and his baronetcy into a barony.

Dazzlem employed many arts to swell his
consequence. His scouts brought all
distinguished visitors to Doem to call upon him,
as if the object of their journey had been to
render him homage.

He bore himself as if he were the idol of
the Doem shrine, the oracle of the Doem grove.
When promising young men took high
honours in the Doem university, as a crowning
honour they were introduced to Dazzlem.
From his equals in the town, he received calls
without returning them. After a slight of
this sort, he would be at first prodigal of
apologies, which became weaker and weaker,
until his manner excused himself, and assumed
it was all right. Great was his astonishment
and resentment, when one or two
eccentrically independent persons cut him for not
returning their calls. Everything in Doem,
indeed, seemed made for the service of
Dazzlem; the garrison held the troops who
protected him, the college bred his protégés,
the harbour was altered to suit his ships, the
bank seemed filled with his money, the prison
with his poachers, trespassers, and pilferers;
the parish church itself appeared to have been
built to give an awful importance to his pew.

Joseph Bubble, Esquire, Fellow of the
Royal Society, was perhaps the most important
partner in the house of Bubble, Bill,
Dazzlem, Drainem and Company. The goods
in which Mr. Bubble dealt, were legally
defined to be "alleged titles of no value."
When a scientific analysis was made of the
dealings of Bubble, it appeared that he bought
nothings, sold nothings, and lent and
borrowed upon the security of nothings.

Bubble was not, however, an imaginative
man. He was only a man who knew how to
extract gold from airy nothings, as other men
wash it out of mud, or crush it out of quartz.
The airy nothings even, were not his own.
Solid, sparkling money without a particle
more than the legal amount of alloy, was made
by him out of schemes rivalling the dreams
of oriental fancy. He raised money upon
the deposit of the title-deeds of castles in
Spain. He sold dear, the shares of mines in
El Dorado: he found eager buyers for
building-lots in Utopia. He pledged the ship
of fools for a large sum with the Doem Bank.
There was published a map in which the
Doem ditch figured as a ship canal, and
Bubble made money by the canal. His gains
by railways were splendid. He gained gold
from railways which were to whirl the
inhabitants of Doem from suburb to suburb,
and from the centre everywhere, subterraneously.
The idea of travelling in the bowels
of the earth, as if in a premature Hades,
drawn by air or fire-engines, delighted many
Doemians. However, those who preferred the
skies were equally provided with railways
running aloft upon arches above the roofs of
the houses. The gold of the aëreal and of
the subterranean party flowed equally into
the coffers of Bubble. Direct lines upon maps
were, however, his strongest plans; being
based upon the mathematical axiom that
the straight lines are the shortest. He
seemed to have the conjuring art of
converting the paper plans of junctions and of
termini into bank-notes.

Bubble had a bitter hatred of busy
meddling people, who minded everybody's
business except their own. When it was
discovered whom he meant, it was found that he
denounced people who neither bought scrip,
nor sold scrip; but who discussed, detected, and
described, the game of scrip. Business, in his
mind, meant premium snatching. When
preparing reports, or answering badgering questions
at meetings of stormy shareholders,
there was a dogged reserve about Bubble
which drove his assailants to despair. When
questioned after dinner in the genial
candour of private life, he would be as frank as
if he were conscious rectitude in person.

"You see the scheme was not worth a rush.
It was a thousand to one it did not get its
bill. However, I did not trouble myself
about that. I did not know who put me on
the committees, nor who were the active
men, nor anything about it, and I never went
near it. A number of shares were allotted
to me—two or three hundred is a fair allotment
to a director, or a provisional committee
man. Of course, the concern was advertised
everywhere, until the shares came out at a
premium. I knew they would never be so
high as at first, so I sold out at once. Be you
sure everybody did the same. I gained two
or three pounds a share, and there was an
end of it. Of course, the concern was as safe
and respectable, as any of them could be for
returning the deposit after deducting the
proper expenses.

"What, safe! not worth a rush and safe!"

"Yes, quite safe."

"What do you mean by safe?"

"I mean as safe as these things generally are."

"How safe is that?"

"Safe to return the deposits, minus the
proper expenses."

"The proper expenses?"

"The preliminary expenses."