"It is indeed a golden autumn . . . A tradition of these days might be handed down to posterity. They deserve a notice in history . . . Was there ever such an autumn? And yet there was never such a panic and hard times in the commercial world. The merchants and banks are suspending and failing all the country over, but not the sand-banks, solid and warm, and streaked with blackberry vines. You may 'run' upon them as much as you please - even as the crickets do, and find their account in it. They are the stockholders in these banks, and I hear them creaking their content . . . In these banks, too, and such as these, are my funds deposited, a fund of health and enjoyment. Their (the crickets) prosperity and happiness and, I trust, mine do not depend on whether the New York banks suspend or no. We do not rely on such a slender security as the thin paper of the Suffolk Bank. To put your trust in such a bank is to be swallowed up and undergo suffocation. Invest, I say, in these country 'banks.' Let your capital be simplicity and contentment . . I have no compassion for, nor sympathy with, this miserable state of things. Banks built of granite, after some Grecian or Roman style, . . . are not so permanent, and cannot give me so good security for capital invested in them, as the heads of weathered hardhack in the meadow. I do not suspect the solvency of these. I know who is their president and cashier."
Henry David Thoreau,
October 14, 1857
Photo: Wild Geranium leaf, golden aspen trees, and the Maroon Bell Peaks, Maroon Bells - Snowmass Wilderness, CO; September 23, 2012. The "sandbanks" here are the shores of drought-stricken Maroon Lake.
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