. They were studying the report of the Government
as to the supply of wheat, which had just been published in the
editions of the evening papers. It was very late in the afternoon of a
lugubrious March day. Long since the gas and electricity had been
lighted in the office, while in the streets the lamps at the corners
were reflected downward in long shafts of light upon the drenched
pavements. From the windows of the room one could see directly up La
Salle Street. The cable cars, as they made the turn into or out of the
street at the corner of Monroe, threw momentary glares of red and green
lights across the mists of rain, and filled the air continually with
the jangle of their bells. Further on one caught a glimpse of the Court
House rising from the pavement like a rain-washed cliff of black
basalt, picked out with winking lights, and beyond that, at the extreme
end of the vista, the girders and cables of the La Salle Street bridge.

The sidewalks on either hand were encumbered with the "six o'clock
crowd" that poured out incessantly from the street entrances of the
office buildings. It was a crowd almost entirely of men, and they moved
only in one direction, buttoned to the chin in rain coats, their
umbrellas bobbing, their feet scuffling through the little pools of wet
in the depressions of the sidewalk. They streamed from out the brokers'
offices and commission houses on either side of La Salle Street,
continually, unendingly, moving with the dragging sluggishness of the
fatigue of a hard day's work. Under that grey sky and blurring veil of
rain they lost their individualities, they became conglomerate--a mass,
slow-moving, black. All day long the torrent had seethed and thundered
through the street--the torrent that swirled out and back from that
vast Pit of roaring within the Board of Trade. Now the Pit was stilled,
the sluice gates of the torrent locked, and from out the thousands of
offices, from out the Board of Trade itself, flowed the black and
sluggish lees, the lifeless dregs that filtered back to their level for
a few hours, stagnation, till in the morning, the whirlpool revolving
once more, should again suck them back into its vortex.

The rain fell uninterruptedly. There was no wind. The cable cars jolted
and jostled over the tracks with a strident whir of vibrating window
glass. In the street, immediately in front of the entrance to the Board
of Trade, a group of pigeons, garnet-eyed, trim, with coral-c