ill be a mob around the bank doors, and if between now and then
anything unusual should happen, there'll be the devil to pay sure. I
tell you I'm so tired out that I'm going home now to rest up."

Together we went uptown on the Elevated, and when I left him at
Thirty-third Street to cross over to my hotel, somehow the dark
forebodings of the morning had been lulled by his frank geniality and
carried away by his enthusiastic rejoicings in the success of our
enterprise. The picture of that soft spring evening hangs in my memory's
gallery--the declining sun seen through a long perspective of gilded
brick and brownstone facades, the heavy rumble of trains, the clamor of
newsboys crying last editions, the packed cable-cars slowly threading
their way amid the hurrying crowds of clerks and shop girls streaming
homeward, the cabs swinging in and out of the throng, through whose
windows I caught glimpses of jewels on bare shoulders, light silks, and
sweeping plumes--the butterflies of fashion or folly hurrying out on
their evening trysts. Broadway, with its hundreds of sights and sounds,
was before me in the hour of its transformation, the street lamps
breaking into incandescence, and the huge electric signs beginning to
glare above the theatre entrances. By the time I reached the Waldorf,
that high abode of Yankee royalty, the kinks and curlicues were so far
ironed from my nerves and brain that I had little doubt of my ability to
take a fall out of Fate in whatever sort of collar-and-elbow tussle she
might designate. In this mood I swung into the huge hotel through the
carriage entrance on Thirty-fourth Street, eager to forget myself amid
the rapt concourse of dollar worshippers, preening themselves against
the plush, onyx, and gildings of the Astor caravansary. I seemed to see
in the mirrors, on the walls, on the buttons of the lackeys' livery, in
the patterns of the rugs, inscribed on the tessellated floors and
painted on the lofty ceilings, dazzling and glittering, the universal
crest of the twisted S with its two upright bars.

_Dollars, dollars, dollars._

Through the office I pushed, my path disputed by the hosts of Croesus
in ambush for market information. Colonels and generals of the
almighty-dollar army were on either flank of me, and the air was thick
with the echo and the rumor of millions. At last I found myself in the
high and splendid room, with its tall windows elaborately curtained with
velvet, its floor space