rved, is generally overlooked by their patrons. I
crammed the morning paper into my overcoat pocket, fell in with the
outrushing current of humanity, and was straightway swept upon the
platform, pinched through the revolving gates, and hustled down the
covered iron stairway to the street. Here the current broke up and
diffused, like the current of a river where it empties into the sea.

This was the first wave of the daily townward tide--clerks, shop-girls,
and stenographers, for the most part intent upon bread and butter _in
futuro_. The jostling and crowding was like an old story to me; I went
through the ordeal each morning with an indifference and abstraction born
of long custom.

The time of the year was January, the year itself 1892. A clear, cold
air with just enough frost in it to stir sluggish blood, induced one to
walk briskly. It was still too early in the day for the usual down-town
crowd, and I proceeded as fast as I wanted to, allowing my thoughts to
dwell undisturbed on the big news topic of the day, which I had just been
reading. And so I did, as I strode along, with the concern of one whose
interest is remote, yet in a way affected.

So the great wheat corner was broken at last! The coterie of operators
headed by Alfred Fluette had discovered to their dismay that the shorts
were anything but "short," for all day yesterday the precious grain had
been pouring into the market in a golden flood. Grain-laden vessels were
speeding from Argentine, where no wheat was supposed to be; trains were
hurrying in from the far Northwest; and even the millers of the land had
awakened to the fact that there was more profit in emptying their bins
and selling for a dollar and sixty cents a bushel the wheat that had cost
them seventy-six cents, than there was in grinding it into flour.

It was another pirate of the pit who had brought disaster to the
bulls--no other than that old fox, Felix Page, himself a manipulator of
successful big deals, and feared perhaps more than any other figure on
the Board of Trade.

But his spectacular smashing of the memorable corner has passed into
history. While Fluette's brokers were buying and sending the price
soaring--skyrocketing is more descriptive, though--Felix Page was selling
in quantities that bewildered and, since it was Page, alarmed the bulls.
Insurance on the lakes had ceased with the advent of winter; the
granaries of the world were supposed to be scraped clean; s