studded with small tables, where after four
o'clock any afternoon, the year round, you will find the active Wall
Street contingent busily discussing the day's doings and plotting good
or evil for the morrow. There they all were, that eventful evening, in
parties of seven or eight clustered at the little tables, and as I
entered a vigorous hail caught my ear and again I found myself
surrounded.

"Sit down a minute, Lawson," said ex-Congressman Jefferson M.
Levy--"Jeff Levy" in Wall Street--"and tell us about Amalgamated. I
suppose there's not a chance to get what one wants unless one subscribes
for five or ten times more than one needs, but if you say that's
straight, I'll put in another subscription for ----."

In the group were sitting "Harry" Weil, who time and again has tied tin
cans to Wall Street's tail; big, bluff, honest "Billy" Oliver, whose
"I'll take ten thousand more" is as familiar to Stock Exchange members
as the sound of the gong; and little "Jakey" Field, most audacious and
resourceful of floor operators, graduated but a few years ago from the
ranks of Wall Street's errand boys--"Jakey" Field, who is able
single-handed to turn a "bear" market in a rout by "bidding 'em up all
round the room five thousand at a crack"--which means he dares buy one
hundred thousand shares off the reel in a demoralized market when every
one is selling, thus standing to make or lose a million or two on his
judgment.

They listened, breathless, while I poured out the story of the terrific
rush of Amalgamated subscribers. Another group hailed me and I recounted
the same story. So it went all over the busy assemblage--"_dollars,
dollars, dollars_," how to get them, how to get them quick. The money
talk ebbed and flowed; the chink of dollars echoed in the rattle of
china, in the tinkling of glasses, in the laughs and salutations, in the
shuffle of feet. It was the one word, the single theme, the alpha and
omega of all these men of talent and virility who accorded me
recognition as one of themselves and assumed that I, too, was crucified
to the two bars on the snaky S; the whole thing was so interesting that
I lost sight of the terrible seriousness of it, and I chuckled as one
does when one sits on the cool grass under the apple-trees in summer and
watches myriads of ants hustling and jostling and bumping over each
other to get away with what to humans is but a tiny grain of dirt.

As I arose to go at last, the head waiter came