of 1884. And it seemed only shrewd a judge of the politics the other day that he had of the province and of the started business, in the little doings of the Junta Militar general agency and importing at the capital-un caballero house of his father's old friend preparadissimo! Good days, Saunders, dead now thirty, and good home-comings to the forty - heavens, how many red tiles and gorgeous patios of years ago! He had not thought his father's house, and to the of old Saunders in many years; pride of his parents at their he still automatically called old friend's eulogies of their him old Saunders, though he son songood days, with the had been greatly junior to his winged sandals of youth on own present age when he died. one's feet. It seemed like Those who were old when we yesterday. And his father, Alec were young are the only genuine Mackenzie, the Scotch ship's old people. But he thought of doctor, who had landed one him now, and could almost day and seen a pretty face, see his red face again, amongst and had never gone on board the shovels and samples of again, had died in 1840; and Manchester goods in the little his South American mother, sale-room, and hear his snore whose face of the young from the back office after Madonna he could recall so almuerzo. Incredible that it well-his grand-daughter was should be so long ago. very like her, had followed in 1853. The very house itself had vanished in the earthquake of 1845, and there was a conventillo-a tenement house Old Saunders had been rich before his end. He, Alejandro Mackenzie, had done that, and it had only been the first of the many things that he had accomplished, the first widening of that tiny stream of money which was to become such a broad river. First, he had been a salesman, travelling on ox - carts and on mules through the remote back-lands of the new republic in the days when the soldiers of the Army of Liberation were scarce back at their ploughs. Good days those, with the sun and sky above one, and the spreading vineyards of one's own land on either side, and every hospitable hacienda glad to see the young Alejandrito, so intelligent beyond his years, so built on its site. Or there had been, twenty years ago, when he had last visited his birthplace, the cathedral town of Tranquilidad. It was a back number now, and only existed for the cathedral. Commerce had deserted it, and he with the commerce. Then, in the 'thirties of the century, had come the first buds of his business genius, the germs of the great financial organism he had created. Loans to the small miners who were the customers of the house, a little here, a little there, after much consideration and arduous visits to remote hillsides, where the one-man shafts of those days were punily scratching at the treasure which lay beneath; judicious purchase and resale, little amalgamations, the gradual conversion of Saunders & Company from merchanting to mine development, with the doubting Saunders counting each of the new dollars in his pocket before venturing them afresh ; the painstaking adaptation of his own Scotch canniness and his quick Spanish wits to the study of silver ores, so that he saw what others missed, in this village, or that river-bed, or the other old abandoned Spanish working, and foresaw what was to come; the safe full of options worth their weight in diamonds, with which the silver boom of the 'forties found the house of Saunders; such had been the logical sequence. That had made them, and it had finished Saunders, who, always possessed of a convivial turn, celebrated himself out of existence at the accession of his good fortune; but he left his young partner his interest in the business, less certain yearly payments to shadowy relatives in Scotland. And with the going of Saunders came the real beginning of Alejandro Mackenzie. He had disposed of his silver holdings in the very heyday of the boom, and had turned his back for ever on Tranquilidad and its queer blend of mining camp and cathedral town. Well, that was something to be proud of. Not one man in a hundred would have done it-an old man would have lacked the courage, a young one the brains, to have launched out into a new enterprise as he had done, abandoning the old like a worn-out shoe. But as he had seen the silver boom coming, he saw it going; that is, before any one else. It warmed his old heart to think of that longforgotten stroke of genius, even on this day of distress. He had turned his attention to banking, and the small front office with its three clerks, which had first borne the sign 66 'Banco de A. Mackenzie y Cia.," had expanded in forty years, with the sureness of destiny, to his present organisation, with its twenty branches in the republic, its London agency, and its connections in every country of importance in the world-the only private bank left of those which had existed in San Martin at its inception. He had worked hard and lived hard, and been hard as iron in the accomplishment of this. No wonder men called him stony-hearted. His marriage and family, his private life, seemed mere incidents to look back upon. He had been ruthless, too, and had come down with the force of ruin upon the client whose difficulties must, as his shrewd eye foresaw, in the end be overwhelming. Sooner or later, what did it matter, and Don Alejandro would inexorably cut off financial aid; he would never throw good money after bad. Because he could listen to the most desperate entreaties with a face of stone, he was called callous-the man with a bag of pesos for a heart. Yet it was not he who was cruel, but economics-the rule of life itself. He could foresee the end before the common run of men, that was all. He knew they had called him hard-his wife's relatives, the society of the capital in which he moved-with regard to Julio. Well, Julio was the best judge of that, now he was a man grown. They had cried shame behind his back, that a joven distinguido a young man of rank-should spend his youth grinding at ledgers, and living on his bank-clerk's salary in foreign lands, when he might be taking the place in the gay capital of San Martin to which his father's position entitled him. He had tried Julio in a furnace, he was well aware, but he had known his metal. Julio had stood the fire. The bank would be safe with him. The boy knew now, having come to manhood, what life meant, and what his father had done for him: developed his inherited bent, given him a lifework, a just appreciation of the power that lay, for good or ill, in the great position to which he would succeed. Julio was a great comfort, his greatest success-a man, when so many of the sons of the great men of Don Alejandro's youth, the founders of the nation, were futres-idlers in the clubs, with VOL. CCXXI.-NO. MCCCXXXV. nothing of their fathers about them. So reflected the old banker, whom men called jocosely, behind their hands, old Don Dinero, old money-bags, who dreamed selfish dreams of gold, and thought of nothing but sweating the peso: But they would have been astonished if they had realised, and Don Alejandro no less if it had occurred to him, how long it was since he had thought of himself, or of money either. At one time the bank had been his chief preoccupation; but the bank had been an assured success a score of years ago, and another and an earlier idol had taken its place-the idol of a boyhood enthusiasm fired by the example of men around him who were giving their very lives in its service, always at the back of his mind, even in his first struggles, but now revealed in its inner shrine the land itself, the country of his birth, the Republic of San Martin. He did not suspect his own patriotism; it was rooted deep in his being, so much a part of him that he could only be dimly aware of it as a profound inarticulate emotion. To see ten ox-carts groan through the dust where there had been only one; to see the irrigation works he had financed stretching out their tranques like silver fingers into desolate valleys, so that they bloomed like the rose; to see the country people in their one-roomed huts, who had less control over their own destiny C than the sapos which croaked lot, after his years of sound in the ponds at night, gradu- influence in the development of ally improving the tenor of the primitive resources of the their frugal peasant lives, and land. But too old, also (and their fat babies, the future he had hoped never to be too citizens of the land, rolling in old for that), to prevent the the sun; to have a power like beginnings of the slow decline Providence over all this, and of which he must be a helpless the brain to use that power witness. unerringly for the sane practical end-that was what he had lived for these thirty years. He had made his influence paramount in the chaotic welter of the country's revenues, and had known a rare, almost sensuous, enjoyment in the telling weight of his hand. He had produced order from disorder, and sitting at the right hand of Presidents, had guided them in the paths of sound finance, so that the country's credit stood higher in the money markets of the world than that of any other South American republic. The peso stood at forty-seven pence pence only a penny under par-in spite of the recent war with Platarica; and in the middle of that war they had borrowed at 4 per cent in London, and been oversubscribed. Who could show the equal of that from Panama to Tierra del Fuego? It had been largely his doing, and the keystone of his career. Now, so it seemed, he was to do this no more. He was an old man, thank God-too old to see his lifework crumble entirely away, his fostered commerce dead from slow paralysis, his common folk destitute again, stripped of the sufficiency which had begun to be the universal Paper money! To think that at this late day, when the country had triumphantly vanquished so much, San Martin should come to it! That when the poverty of the early days of independence, the wastage of civil war, the misrule of dictators, had all been overcome, and duly compensated for in full, they were tamely to leave their proud position of integrity, and to have recourse to that open fraud, an inconvertible paper currency. And he, with his record behind him, overborne and set aside; his bank, and the power of his hand, defied; and to know in his heart that he could be SO defied with impunity. Twenty-ay, ten-years ago his mere disapproval, voiced in the proper quarters, would have been enough to scotch such a scheme. But the great men of his middle age were dead, or past their usefulness, and he was an old man. There was a sudden hush in the body of the bank outside, and a bolting and barring of the massive front doors. It was twelve o'clock, the time of almuerzo, and the bank would be silent for two hours. The head mozo, his face a mahogany mask over the white linen of It been wiser than he knew; for where was silver now? would take many more of those chests of the soft white metal to buy the country's gold money to-day. The mozo, bowing respectfully, handed him his stick and silk hat, and opened the little inner door in the great carved portal which dated from the times of the Colony. Don Alejandro stood for a moment, as was his wont, on the his summer tunic, hovered outside the glass door. Don Alejandro rose wearily, and pulled down the slide of his desk. He crossed the room, and stood for a moment looking up at the portrait of General Santos, for eleven years Dictator of San Martin; a bloody old despot, with shootings against walls, but a patriot too; his iron hand had given the country two lustres of much-needed peace. Gazing upon the pictured lineaments, threshold, while the old coachencircled by their ornamental wreath of laurels, sabres, and cannon, with an angel atop, he seemed to feel again the rough clutch on his shoulder, and to hear the harsh voice of the old tyrant. "Valgame Dios! What do I know of your standards and your gold and silver? But I know men, Alejandro, none better. Do what thou wilt, if it is for the good of the country; and if any man interferes with thy doings, young man, mention the name of Baltasar Santos! Go thou with God!" And, armed with that all-powerful mandate, in the five years that followed he had ousted the silver dollar from its immemorial place as the money of the land, and substituted the new gold eagle. How well he remembered those days, and the great cases of battered pesos, shipped overseas as bullion to be melted down, and the first new-milled bright eagle, now scratched and old upon his watch-chain. He had freed the land from silver, and had man, who had been watching for a sight of him from the corner of the plaza, brought up his private coche, with its four dun-coloured mules and silver harness. The passers-by, seeing his erect old figure in its neat black suit and spotless linen, said to each other with the familiarity bred by a town where everybody knows everybody, "There goes Don Alejandro, fresh from counting his money. Ojalá, that I stood in his shoes!" Nothing of the old man's feelings showed on his composed ivory features, but he looked on the familiar scene with inward sorrow. The fruit-seller, who stood every day with his laden baskets at the foot of the bank steps, was calling melodiously, "Strawberries! Nice little fresh strawberries! Ten cents the hundred ! There would be no strawberries at ten cents in a year or two's time. Paper money! Poor folks, so poor already, with food prices stable. The penetrating brain of the old man, his foresight, the very |