hifters in their windowed cubby at
a network of railway intersections--to prevent collisions.

At both ends of the floor and along one side are narrow railed-off
spaces full of clerks figuring at desks, of telegraph operators clicking
their machines, of messenger-boys arriving and departing in haste, of
unprivileged operators nervously watching the scene and waiting the
chance of a word with some one on the floor; through noiseless swinging
doors men are entering and departing every moment--men in a hurry, men
with anxious faces, conscious that the fate of the country is in their
hands. On the floor itself are five hundred, perhaps a thousand, men,
gathered for the most part in small groups about little stands upon
the summit of which is a rallying legend, talking, laughing, screaming,
good-natured, indifferent, excited, running hither and thither in
response to changing figures in the checker-board squares on the great
wall opposite--calm, cynical one moment, the next violently agitated,
shouting, gesticulating, rushing together, shaking their fists in a
tumult of passion which presently subsides.

The swarms ebb and flow about these little stands--bees, not bringing
any honey, but attracted to the hive where it is rumored most honey is
to be had. By habit some always stand or sit about a particular hive,
waiting for the show of comb. By-and-by there is a stir; the crowd
thickens; one beardless youth shouts out the figure "one-half"; another
howls, "three-eighths." The first one nods. It is done. The electric
wire running up the stand quivers and takes the figure, passes it to all
the other wires, transmits it to every office and hotel in the city, to
all the "tickers" in ten thousand chambers and "bucketshops" and
offices in the republic. Suddenly on the bulletin-boards in New Orleans,
Chicago, San Francisco, Podunk, Liverpool, appear the mysterious
"three-eighths," electrifying the watchers of these boards, who begin to
jabber and gesticulate and "transact business." It is wonderful.

What induced the beardless young man to make this "investment" in
"three-eighths"--who can tell? Perhaps he had heard, as he came into
the room, that the Secretary of the Treasury was going to make a call of
Fives; perhaps he had heard that Bismarck had said that the French blood
was too thin and needed a little more iron; perhaps he had heard that a
norther in Texas had killed a herd of cattle, or that two grasshoppers
had been seen