The things we do!

B. C.
was never in so flourishing a state as at that time when Hobson Brothers
had refused its drafts; there could be no question that the Company had
received a severe wound and was deeply if not vitally injured by the
conduct of the London firm.
The propensity to sell out became quite epidemic amongst the
shareholders. Everybody was anxious to realise. Why, out of the thirty
names inscribed on poor Mrs. Clive's cocoa-nut tree no less than twenty
deserters might be mentioned, or at least who would desert could they
find an opportunity of doing so with arms and baggage. Wrathfully the
good Colonel scratched the names of those faithless ones out of his
daughter's visiting-book: haughtily he met them in the street; to desert
the B. B. C. at the hour of peril was, in his idea, like applying for
leave of absence on the eve of an action. He would not see that the
question was not one of sentiment at all, but of chances and arithmetic;
he would not hear with patience of men quitting the ship, as he called
it.


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