Coal Company," obliquely reading the gilt inscription on
the back; "I have heard much of it. Pray do you happen to have with you
any statement of the condition of your company."

"A statement has lately been printed."

"Pardon me, but I am naturally inquisitive. Have you a copy with you?"

"I tell you again, I do not think that it would be suitable to convert
this boat into the Company's office.--That unfortunate man, did you
relieve him at all?"

"Let the unfortunate man relieve himself.--Hand me the statement."

"Well, you are such a business-man, I can hardly deny you. Here,"
handing a small, printed pamphlet.

The youth turned it over sagely.

"I hate a suspicious man," said the other, observing him; "but I must
say I like to see a cautious one."

"I can gratify you there," languidly returning the pamphlet; "for, as I
said before, I am naturally inquisitive; I am also circumspect. No
appearances can deceive me. Your statement," he added "tells a very fine
story; but pray, was not your stock a little heavy awhile ago? downward
tendency? Sort of low spirits among holders on the subject of that
stock?"

"Yes, there was a depression. But how came it? who devised it? The
'bears,' sir. The depression of our stock was solely owing to the
growling, the hypocritical growling, of the bears."

"How, hypocritical?"

"Why, the most monstrous of all hypocrites are these bears: hypocrites
by inversion; hypocrites in the simulation of things dark instead of
bright; souls that thrive, less upon depression, than the fiction of
depression; professors of the wicked art of manufacturing depressions;
spurious Jeremiahs; sham Heraclituses, who, the lugubrious day done,
return, like sham Lazaruses among the beggars, to make merry over the
gains got by their pretended sore heads--scoundrelly bears!"

"You are warm against these bears?"

"If I am, it is less from the remembrance of their stratagems as to our
stock, than from the persuasion that these same destroyers of
confidence, and gloomy philosophers of the stock-market, though false in
themselves, are yet true types of most destroyers of confidence and
gloomy philosophers, the world over. Fellows who, whether in stocks,
politics, bread-stuffs, morals, metaphysics, religion--be it what it
may--trump up their black panics in the naturally-quiet brightness,
solely with a view to some sort of covert advantage. That corpse of
calamity which the gloomy philosopher parades, is