e the Pit. One of the floor
officers, an old fellow in uniform and vizored cap, appeared, gently
shouldering towards the door the groups wherein the bidding and
offering were still languidly going on. His voice full of
remonstration, he repeated continually:

"Time's up, gentlemen. Go on now and get your lunch. Lunch time now. Go
on now, or I'll have to report you. Time's up."

The tide set toward the doorways. In the gallery the few visitors rose,
putting on coats and wraps. Over by the check counter, to the right of
the south entrance to the floor, a throng of brokers and traders
jostled each other, reaching over one another's shoulders for hats and
ulsters. In steadily increasing numbers they poured out of the north
and south entrances, on their way to turn in their trading cards to the
offices.

Little by little the floor emptied. The provision and grain pits were
deserted, and as the clamour of the place lapsed away the telegraph
instruments began to make themselves heard once more, together with the
chanting of the messenger boys.

Swept clean in the morning, the floor itself, seen now through the
thinning groups, was littered from end to end with scattered
grain--oats, wheat, corn, and barley, with wisps of hay, peanut shells,
apple parings, and orange peel, with torn newspapers, odds and ends of
memoranda, crushed paper darts, and above all with a countless
multitude of yellow telegraph forms, thousands upon thousands, crumpled
and muddied under the trampling of innumerable feet. It was the debris
of the battle-field, the abandoned impedimenta and broken weapons of
contending armies, the detritus of conflict, torn, broken, and rent,
that at the end of each day's combat encumbered the field.

At last even the click of the last of telegraph keys died down.
Shouldering themselves into their overcoats, the operators departed,
calling back and forth to one another, making "dates," and cracking
jokes. Washerwomen appeared with steaming pails, porters pushing great
brooms before them began gathering the refuse of the floor into heaps.

Between the wheat and corn pits a band of young fellows, some of them
absolute boys, appeared. These were the settlement clerks. They carried
long account books. It was their duty to get the trades of the day into
a "ring"--to trace the course of a lot of wheat which had changed hands
perhaps a score of times during the trading--and their calls of "Wheat
sold to Teller and West,"