, owe no little to the assistance which they have had from our house. If
they don't like us, why do they go on dealing with us? We don't want them and
their bills. We were a leading house fifty years before they were born, and
shall continue to be so long after they come to an end.« Such was Barnes's case
as stated by himself. It was not a very bad one, or very unfairly stated,
considering the advocate. I believe he has always persisted in thinking that he
never did his uncle any wrong.
    Mr. Jolly and Mr. Sherrick then both entreated Thomas Newcome to use his
best endeavours, and bring the connection of the B.B.C. and Hobson Brothers to a
speedy end. But Jolly was an interested party: he and his friends would have had
the agency of the B.B.C. and the profits thereof, which Hobsons had taken from
them. Mr. Sherrick was an outside practitioner, a guerilla amongst regular
merchants. The opinions of one and the other, though submitted by Thomas Newcome
duly to his co-partners, the managers and London Board of Directors of the
Bundelcund Banking Company, were overruled by that assembly.
    They had their establishment and apartments in the City; they had their
clerks and messengers, their managers' room and board-room, their meetings,
where no doubt great quantities of letters were read, vast ledgers produced;
where Tom Newcome was voted into the chair, and voted out with thanks; where
speeches were made, and the affairs of the B.B.C. properly discussed. These
subjects are mysterious, terrifying, unknown to me. I cannot pretend to describe
them. Fred Bayham, I remember, used to be great in his knowledge of the affairs
of the Bundelcund Banking Company. He talked of cotton, wool, copper, opium,
indigo, Singapore, Manilla, China, Calcutta, Australia, with prodigious
eloquence and fluency. His conversation was about millions. The most astounding
paragraphs used to appear in the Pall Mall Gazette regarding the annual dinner
at Blackwall, which the directors gave, and to which he and George and I, as
friends of the court, were invited. What orations were uttered, what flowing
bumpers emptied in the praise of this great Company; what quantities of turtle
and punch did Fred devour at its expense! Colonel Newcome was the kindly old
chairman at these banquets; the Prince, his son, taking but a modest part in
these ceremonies, and sitting with us, his old cronies.
