The installment to carry on the adate was paid, though it depressed the stock, but Jones could not see how having paid the company five thousand dollars in installments should depress _his_ stock in the market. “Hang it!” said he, “the company is that much richer in property and excavations, and don’t I belong to the company—haven’t I a thousand shares? It’s only paying money out of one pocket, and putting into the other. Wilkins may laugh, but he’s a fool! That’s a capital idea about the furnace. You’re a boy, Uptosnuff—_you_ are?”
The installment for _crushing_ purposes was soon called in also, and paid, though the stock looked sickly, and trembled as if it had the ague, or had passed through a crushing process on its own hook. It was just composing itself when Uptosnuff discovered that it was of the highest importance to the company to have a small engine and an iron pump erected at the mines at once, _as the richest ore is always found below water level_!
Jones—the active, energetic Jones—“had no doubt of it at all. The Cornish miners assured him, when he was up, that as soon as they got below water level, they would come to something that couldn’t be trifled with. If Wilkins wasn’t a fool he would go in soon, before it gets out.”
Uptosnuff, too, had had a quantity of the late ore assayed, and Professor Stuffemwell, Geologist to Her Majesty, thought it would _do_ bravely. If ore that yielded fifty per cent. would not, he would like to know how her majesty’s subjects got rich, after paying the miners, on mines that yield but fifteen per cent.
Copper buttons now replenished the pockets of dealers, and the stock made several violent gasps and starts for a desirable existence. But it was consumptive—evidently going into a rapid decline. The crushing process and the iron pump having depressed its spirits, and exhausted still further its vital energy.
Grubemout thought that if the buttons were pressed into _bars_, and shown upon Change it might be encouraging, and mitigate the violence of the disease; but some wag of a broker suggested that it was “_a_ BAR _sinister_;” which remark sinister ruffled the backs of the _bars_, caused the bulls to toss their horns unpleasantly, and shook still further the liveliness of the stock, which drooped visibly under the imputation.