IV.

A BRAHMAN.

WHOEVER has been in Boston remembers or has seen the old Beacon Hill Bank, which stood-not on Beacon Hill indeed-but in that part of School Street now occupied by the great City Hall. You passed down by the dirty old church on the north-east corner of School and Tremont Streets, which stands trying to hide its ugly face behind a row of columns like sooty fingers, and whose School Street side is quite bare and has the distracted appearance peculiar to buildings erected on an incline :— passing this, you came in sight of the Bank, a darksome respectable edifice of brick, two-anda-half stories high and gambrel-roofed. stood a little back from the street, much as an antiquated aristocrat might withdraw himself

It

from the stream of modern life and fancy himself exclusive. The poor old Bank! Its respectable brick walls have contributed a few rubbish heaps to the new land in Back-bay, perhaps; and its floors and gambrel-roof have long since vanished up somebody's chimney; only its money-its baser part, still survives and circulates! Aristocracy and exclusivism do not

pay now.

The Bank, perhaps, took its title from the fact that it owed its chief support to the old Beacon Hill families Boston's aristocracy: and Boston's standard names appeared on its list of managers. If business led you that way, you mounted the well-worn steps and entered the rather strict and formal door, over which clung the weather-worn sign-faded gold lettering on a rusty black back-ground. Nothing that met your eyes looked new, although everything was scrupulously neat. Opposite the doorway a flight of wooden stairs mounted

to the next floor, where were the musty offices of some old Puritan lawyers. Leaving the stairs on your left, you passed down a dusky passage, and through a glass door: when behold! the banking-room with its four grave bald-headed clerks. But you came not to draw or deposit, your business was with the President. "Mr MacGentle in?" "That way, sir." You opened a door with "Private" painted in black letters upon the ground-glass panel. Another bald-headed gentleman, with a grim determination about the mouth, rose up from his table and barred your way. This was Mr Dyke, the breakwater against which the waves of would-be intruders into the inner seclusion, often broke themselves in vain; unless you had a genuine pass, your expedition ended there.

Our pass (for we, too, are to call on Mr MacGentle) would carry us through solider obstructions than Mr Dyke; it is the pass of imagina

tion. He does not so much as raise his head as

we brush by him.

But first let us inquire who (besides President of the Beacon Hill Bank) this Mr MacGentle is. He is a man of cultivation and refinement, a scholar and a reader: he has travelled, and it is said can handle a pen to better purpose than the signing bank-notes. In his earlier In his earlier years he studied Law, and gained a certain degree of distinction in the profession; although (owing perhaps to his having entered it with too ideal and high-strung views as to its nature and scope) he never met with what is vulgarly called success. Luckily for the ideal barrister, an ample private estate made him independent of professional earnings. Later in life he trod the confines of politics, still, however, enveloping himself in that theoretical, unpractical atmosphere which was his most marked, and to some people most incomprehensible characteristic. A certain mild halo of statesmanship ever after

invested him; not that he had at any time actually borne a share in the government of the nation, but it was understood that he might have done so had he so chosen, or had his political principles been tough and elastic enough to endure the wear and strain of action. As it was, some of the most renowned men in the Senate were known to have been his intimates at College, and he still met and conversed with them on terms of equality.

Between law, literature and statesmanship, in all which pursuits he had acquired respect and goodwill without actually accomplishing anything, Mr MacGentle seated himself, no one knew exactly why, in the presidential chair of the Beacon Hill Bank. No sooner was he there than everybody saw that there he belonged. His social position, his culture, his honourable, albeit intangible, record, suited the old Bank well. He had an air of subdued wisdom, and people were fond of appealing to his