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Favoured by a hint from Smithson, his particular friends followed his
lead, and rushed into the markets to buy all the cochineal that could be
had; to buy at any price, since the market was rising hourly. And then,
all in a moment, as the sky clouds over on a summer day, there came a
dulness in the cochineal market, and the female coccus was being sold at
an enormous sacrifice. And anon it leaked out that Mr. Smithson had
grown tired of cochineal, and had been selling for the last week or two;
and it was noised abroad that this rise and fall in cocci had brought
Mr. Smithson seventy thousand pounds.
Mr. Smithson was said to have commenced life in a very humble capacity.
There were some who declared he was the very youth who stooped to pick
up a pin in a Parisian banker's courtyard, after his services as clerk
had just been rejected by the firm, and who was thereupon recognised as
a youth worthy of favour and taken into the banker's office. But this
touching incident of the pin was too ancient a tradition to fit Mr.
Smithson, still under forty.


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