The Financier | Page 4

was sure that Andrew Jackson was all wrong in his opposition to Nicholas Biddle and
the United States Bank, one of the great issues of the day; and he was worried, as he
might well be, by the perfect storm of wildcat money which was floating about and which
was constantly coming to his bank--discounted, of course, and handed out again to

anxious borrowers at a profit. His bank was the Third National of Philadelphia, located in
that center of all Philadelphia and indeed, at that time, of practically all national
finance--Third Street--and its owners conducted a brokerage business as a side line.
There was a perfect plague of State banks, great and small, in those days, issuing notes
practically without regulation upon insecure and unknown assets and failing and
suspending with astonishing rapidity; and a knowledge of all these was an important
requirement of Mr. Cowperwood's position. As a result, he had become the soul of
caution. Unfortunately, for him, he lacked in a great measure the two things that are
necessary for distinction in any field--magnetism and vision. He was not destined to be a
great financier, though he was marked out to be a moderately successful one.
Mrs. Cowperwood was of a religious temperament--a small woman, with light-brown
hair and clear, brown eyes, who had been very attractive in her day, but had become
rather prim and matter-of-fact and inclined to take very seriously the maternal care of her
three sons and one daughter. The former, captained by Frank, the eldest, were a source of
considerable annoyance to her, for they were forever making expeditions to different
parts of the city, getting in with bad boys, probably, and seeing and hearing things they
should neither see nor hear.
Frank Cowperwood, even at ten, was a natural-born leader. At the day school he attended,
and later at the Central High School, he was looked upon as one whose common sense
could unquestionably be trusted in all cases. He was a sturdy youth, courageous and
defiant. From the very start of his life, he wanted to know about economics and politics.
He cared nothing for books. He was a clean, stalky, shapely boy, with a bright, clean-cut,
incisive face; large, clear, gray eyes; a wide forehead; short, bristly, dark-brown hair. He
had an incisive, quick-motioned, self-sufficient manner, and was forever asking questions
with a keen desire for an intelligent reply. He never had an ache or pain, ate his food with
gusto, and ruled his brothers with a rod of iron. "Come on, Joe!" "Hurry, Ed!" These
commands were issued in no rough but always a sure way, and Joe and Ed came. They
looked up to Frank from the first as a master, and what he had to say was listened to
eagerly.
He was forever pondering, pondering--one fact astonishing him quite as much as
another--for he could not figure out how this thing he had come into--this life--was
organized. How did all these people get into the world? What were they doing here? Who
started things, anyhow? His mother told him the story of Adam and Eve, but he didn't
believe it. There was a fish-market not so very far from his home, and there, on his way
to see his father at the bank, or conducting his brothers on after-school expeditions, he
liked to look at a certain tank in front of one store where were kept odd specimens of
sea-life brought in by the Delaware Bay fishermen. He saw once there a sea-horse--just a
queer little sea-animal that looked somewhat like a horse--and another time he saw an
electric eel which Benjamin Franklin's discovery had explained. One day he saw a squid
and a lobster put in the tank, and in connection with them was witness to a tragedy which
stayed with him all his life and cleared things up considerably intellectually. The lobster,
it appeared from the talk of the idle bystanders, was offered no food, as the squid was
considered his rightful prey. He lay at the bottom of the clear glass tank on the yellow
sand, apparently seeing nothing--you could not tell in which way his beady, black buttons

of eyes were looking--but apparently they were never off the body of the squid. The latter,
pale and waxy in texture, looking very much like pork fat or jade, moved about in
torpedo fashion; but his movements were apparently never out of the eyes of his enemy,
for by degrees small portions of his body began to disappear, snapped off by the
relentless claws of his pursuer. The lobster would leap like a catapult to where the squid
was apparently idly dreaming, and the squid, very alert, would dart away, shooting out at
the same time a cloud of ink, behind which it would disappear.