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The panic of 1857 depressed the lumber industry, in common with all other kinds of business, and the young Buckeye met with financial reverses, as did nearly everybody in those days, though it is agreed that he showed indications of the dash and self-reliance that were marked features of his subsequent career both in the army and in civil life.
We rode on to where old Folkard told us he expected to find the horses. Surmounting a slight elevation, we soon caught sight of a score of animals, evidently those of the Indians. To catch them was no easy matter, for just at the moment we appeared they seemed to be seized by a sudden panic, and began prancing and rearing in the strangest fashion.
Henry and his comrades did not pursue. They knew that they must act with all speed, as the Wyandots would quickly recover from their panic, and come back in a force that was still two to one. A single sweep of his knife and his old schoolmaster's arms were free. Then he shouted in the dazed man's ears: "Come, Mr. Pennypacker, we must run for it! Don't you see who we are?
Aleck Webster remained ashore for a longer time; and finding that his father belonged to an organized band of Union men who held secret meetings in the swamp, and whose object it was to oppose the tactics pursued by their rebel neighbors, he joined his fortunes with theirs, and went to work with such energy that in less that two weeks' time he had the settlement in such a panic that its prominent citizens thought seriously of calling upon the garrison at Plymouth for protection.
The big exciting thing was that he had made a thrilling discovery in the midst of that insane panic. He was in love for the first time in life foolishly and madly in love. Fighting and elbowing his way through that throng of desperate terror-stricken men and horses it had come to him in a flash that life was sweet and precious because Betty Winter was in it.
This of itself would have been enough to throw the United States into a panic; but, worse than all, the presence of the air-ships, holding at their mercy the arsenals and the richest cities in the Eastern States, proved that tremendous and all as it was, this was only a phase of some vast and mysterious cataclysm which might as easily involve the whole civilised world as it could overwhelm the United States of America.
After all, it seemed, this poor young man merely wanted sympathy, not romance. She had been mistaken, she felt, about that gleam in his eyes. It was not the love-light: it was the light of panic. He was the author of the play.
Fatuous self-complacency or vanity, or short-sightedness in refusing to prepare for danger, is both foolish and wicked in such a nation as ours; and past experience has shown that such fatuity in refusing to recognize or prepare for any crisis in advance is usually succeeded by a mad panic of hysterical fear once the crisis has actually arrived.
My own observation of English politics suggests that in a modern national state, this panic effect of the combination of nervous excitement with physical contact is not of great importance.
The dismissal was the signal for a struggle to whose danger Charles was far from blinding himself. What had saved him till now was his cynical courage. In the midst of the terror and panic of the Plot men "wondered to see him quite cheerful amidst such an intricacy of troubles," says the courtly Reresby, "but it was not in his nature to think or perplex himself much about anything."
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