their efforts to fill orders.
Those on the outside made wild rushes to get into the
whirlpool. Men who are generally calm fell over each other
in their excitement. Scores of arms whipped the air, and men
yelled themselves hoarse. So great was the din and so
compact the yelling crowd that those on one side of the post
did not know the bidding on the other. At one point Sugar
was going at 159, and five feet away it was bringing 164.
While almost at arm's-length farther away it was going at
160, and farther around the post at 162.

The excitement became general among the offices of
stock-brokers as the news flew on the ticker. Members of
firms who were not on the floor gathered about the tickers
in excited groups and watched the pyrotechnic fluctuations
of Sugar to the exclusion of all other stocks. The
quotations came out at two and three points apart. One
minute the stock was away up, and the next it seemed to fall
hopelessly. Then it would as suddenly soar upward again. It
reached 170, and in five minutes it was down to 152.

* * * * *

[From the _Boston Post_, March 22, 1899]

Late in the afternoon Mr. Lawson was induced to give the
following explanation of his movements in Sugar: "You know
it is not conducive to the health of an active operator to
talk on what he is doing, for if he expects to retain his
hirsute adornment he must either keep jumping so lively that
none of the expert scalpers who haunt the jungles of Wall
Street can find him long enough in one spot to cut the floor
from under him, or he must envelop himself in mystery so
dense that all seeking for him will grow color-blind; but on
this particular commodity--Sugar--I can depart from the
standard formula.

"I have been twenty-nine years dodging the scalping-knives
of Wall Street Comanches, and, although I am still here, I
have many places on my head where the hair refuses to grow,
and, strange to tell, almost all the bare spots are labelled
'Sugar.' I suppose that I have, during the past ten years,
contributed money enough to Sugar to endow a fair-sized
asylum for tailless bears. It has never seemed to matter
whether I bought or sold, went long or short, the dollars
which I secured by the employment of pick and shovel,