With the money which this verdict brought him, Mr. Grant improved a part of his two acres—which he was persuaded to cut up into town lots—by building the brick tavern, and the store that stands next door to it. These were the first buildings of any note in Quodlibet, and are generally supposed to have given rise to the incorporation of the Borough by the Legislature. Jesse Ferret took a lease of the tavern as soon as it was finished, and set up the sign of "The Hero"—meaning thereby General Jackson—which, by-the-by, was the first piece of historical painting that the celebrated Quipes ever attempted. The store was rented by Frederick Barndollar for his son Jacob, who was just then going to marry Ferret's daughter Susan, and open in the Iron and Flour Forwarding and Commission line, in company with Anthony Hardbottle, his own brother-in-law.
This was the state of things in Quodlibet five years before "The Removal," from which period, up to the date of the Removal, although Barndollar & Hardbottle did a tolerable business, and Ferret had a fair run of custom, there were not above a dozen new tenements built in the Borough. But a bright destiny was yet in reserve for Quodlibet; and as I propose to unfold some incidents of its history belonging to these later times, I cannot pretermit the opportunity now afforded me to glance, though in a perfunctory and hasty fashion, at some striking events which seemed to presignify and illustrate its marvelously sudden growth.
I think it was in the very month of the Removal of the Deposits, that Theodore Fog broke up at Tumbledown, on the other side of the Hogback, and came over to Quodlibet to practice law. And it was looked upon as a very notable thing, that, in the course of the following winter, Nicodemus Handy should have also quitted Tumbledown and brought his sign, as a lottery agent, to Quodlibet, and set up that business in our Borough. There was a wonderful intimacy struck up between him and Fog, and a good many visits were made by Nicodemus during the fall, before he came over to settle. Our people marveled at this matter, and were not a little puzzled to make out the meaning of it, knowing that Nicodemus Handy was a shrewd man, and not likely, without some good reason for it, to strike up a friendship with a person so little given to business as Theodore Fog, against whom I desire to say nothing, holding his abilities in great respect, but meaning only to infer that as Theodore is considered high-flown in his speech, and rather too fond of living about Ferret's bar-room, it was thought strange that Nicodemus, who is plain spoken, and of the Temperance principle, should have taken up with him. It was not long after Mr. Handy had seated himself in Quodlibet, and placed his sign at the door of a small weather-boarded office, ten feet by twelve, and within a stone-throw of Fog's, before the public were favored with an insight into the cause of this intimacy between these two friends. This was disclosed in a plan for establishing The Patriotic Copperplate Bank of Quodlibet, the particulars whereof were made known at a meeting held in the dining-room of "The Hero" one evening in March, when Theodore Fog made a flowery speech on the subject to ten persons, counting Ferret and Nim Porter the bar-keeper. The capital of the bank was proposed to be half a million, and the stock one hundred dollars a share, of which one dollar was to be paid in, and the remainder to be secured by promissory notes, payable on demand, if convenient.
This excellent scheme found many supporters; and, accordingly, when the time came for action, the whole amount was subscribed by Handy and Fog and ten of their particular friends, who had an eye to being directors and officers of the bank—to whom might also be added about thirty boatmen, who, together with the boys of my academy, lent their names to Mr. Handy.
Through the liberality of Fog, the necessary cash was supplied out of three hundred dollars, the remains of a trust fund in his hands belonging to a family of orphans in the neighborhood of Tumbledown, who had not yet had occasion to know from their attorney, the said Theodore Fog himself, of their success in a cause relating to this fund which had been gained some months before. As Nicodemus managed the subscriptions, which indeed he did with wonderful skill, these three hundred dollars went a great way in making up the payments on considerably more than the majority of the stock: and this being adjusted, he undertook a visit to the Legislature, where, through the disinterested exertions of some staunch Democratic friends, he procured a most unexceptionable charter for the bank, full of all sorts of provisions, conditions, and clauses necessary to enable it to accommodate the public with as much paper money as the said public could possibly desire.
In consideration of these great services, Nicodemus Handy elected himself Cashier; and, at the same time, had well-nigh fallen into a quarrel with Fog, who had set his heart upon being President—which, in view of the fact that that gentleman's habits were somewhat irregular after twelve o'clock in the day, Nicodemus would by no means consent to. This dissension, however, was seemingly healed, by bringing in as President my worshipful pupil, the Hon. Middleton Flam, now our member of Congress, and by making Theodore one of the directors, besides giving him the law business of the bank. It was always thought, notwithstanding Fog pretended to be satisfied at the time with this arrangement, that it rankled in his bosom, and bred a jealousy between him and his associates in the bank, and helped to drive him to drinking faster than he would naturally have done, if his feelings had not been aggravated by this act of supposed ingratitude.
I should not omit to mention that Nicodemus Handy was a man of exact and scrupulous circumspection, and noted for the deliberation with which he weighed the consequences of his actions, or, as the common saying is, "looked before he leapt"—a remarkable proof of which kind of wisdom he afforded at this time. Having been compelled by circumstances to live beyond the avails of his lottery business, and thereby to bring himself under some impracticable liabilities, he made it a point of conscience, before he could permit himself to be clothed with the dignity of a cashier, or even to place a share of stock in his own name on the books, to swear out in open court, and to surrender, for the benefit of his numerous and patient creditors, his whole stock of worldly goods—consisting, according to the inventory thereof on record, which I have seen, of a cylindrical sheet-iron stove, two chairs, a desk and a sign-board, this latter being, as I remember, of the shape of a screen, on each leaf of which "Nicodemus Handy" was printed, together with the scheme of a lottery, set forth in large red and blue letters. He barely retained what the law allowed him, being his mere wearing apparel; to wit, a bran new suit of black superfine Saxony, one dozen of the best cambric linen shirts, as many lawn pocket handkerchiefs, white kid gloves, and such other trivial but gentlemanlike appurtenances as denoted that extreme neatness of dress in which Mr. Handy has ever taken a just pride, and which has been so often remarked by his friends as one of the strong points in his character. These articles, it was said, he had procured not more with a provident eye to that state of destitution into which the generous surrender of his property was about to plunge him, than with a decent regard to the respectability of appearance which the public, he conceived, had a right to exact from the Cashier of the Patriotic Copperplate Bank of Quodlibet. All right-minded persons will naturally commend this prudence, and applaud Mr. Handy's sense of the dignity proper to so important and elevated a station—a station which Theodore Fog, in his speech at "The Hero," so appropriately eulogized as one "of financial, fiscal, and monetary responsibility."
There was one circumstance connected with the history of the establishment of the bank that excited great observation among our folks: that was the dislike Michael Grant took up against it from its very beginning. It was an indiscriminate, unmitigable, dogged dislike to the whole concern, which, by degrees, brought him into a bad opinion of our Borough, and I verily believe was the cause why, from that time forward, he kept himself so much at his farm near the Hogback, and grew to be, as if it were out of mere opposition, so unhappily, and indeed I may say, so perversely stubborn in those iniquitous Whig sentiments which he was in the habit of uttering. I have heard him say that he thought as badly as a man could think, of the grounds for starting the bank, and still worse of the men who started it—which, certainly, was a very rash expression, considering that our congressman, the Hon. Middleton Flam, was President and one of the first patrons of the institution, and that such a man as Nicodemus Handy was Cashier; to say nothing of Theodore Fog, whose habits, we are willing to confess, might, in the estimation of some men, give some little color to my worthy friend's vituperation.
Now, there was no man in Quodlibet whom Handy and Fog so much desired, or strove so hard, to bring into the bank scheme as Mr. Grant. They made every sort of effort and used all kinds of arguments to entice him.