fe: "Mr. Lawson, you will put
Sugar up?--you surely will, just this once--and we will teach the
children to pray for you and yours, and God answers this kind of
prayers, you know He does."

The picture haunted me; I saw it in the market prices; I heard the story
in each tick of the ticker and each rustle of the tape; and every time
my eye caught "SUG," the stock-exchange abbreviation for Sugar, I
winced, as one does at the dentist's probe--well, I could not stand it.
I determined to put up Sugar--that is, I determined to try. Little the
woman knew what she asked when she wrote: "You will put up Sugar?" She
had read that a stock operator works magic, but it had never entered her
head that his wand was a stick of dynamite a thousand times
concentrated--a stick of dynamite that the law of stock-market averages
shows goes off in his hand nine out of every ten times it is handled,
and that when it goes off there is nothing more for the handler but the
minister, the flowers, and the head-stone; indeed, often the explosion
leaves nothing with which to buy even a head-stone! Little she thought
that it might strain the wealth of the Bank of England to move Sugar up
twelve points. I moved it up, and it went so easy--oh, so easy!
that--well, I will let the first description I pick from my scrap-book
from among a hundred from the daily press tell the story:

[From the _Boston Journal_, March 17, 1899]

LAWSON'S LUMP

HIS COFFEE SWEETENED WITH QUARTER OF A MILLION--MADE IT IN
SUGAR THURSDAY IN TWO HOURS' TRADING

A quarter of a million in a day!

That was Thomas W. Lawson's record for March 16, 1899.

The celebrated "Unthroned King of State Street" was on top
of the Sugar market; that is the reason of it all.

Sugar was the big card of stock speculation yesterday.

Indeed, the stock had one of the wildest days in its
history, and its high price--$170--reached amid great
excitement--is the highest on record. The speculation was
something tremendous, and it has been through the
speculation that the people who have been under the
impression that the markets were drifting into a dull and
uninteresting condition have had a sudden awakening.

From the opening it quickly advanced to 149, receded a point
or more, and shortly after noon started sharply upward. The
demand for it came so rapidly that the tape could not keep
up with