get letters, and, if possible, to answer
them. Kiss my godchild for me, bless it, and Believe me ever yours,

NELSON AND BRONTE.

"WHITE-HAT" DAY.

On one of the last days in September we were the astonished recipients
of a singular and mysterious invitation from a member of the New York
Board of Brokers. The note contained words like these: "Come to the
Exchange on Monday, September 30th: white hats are declared confiscated
on that day."

It would have puzzled Oedipus or a Philadelphia lawyer to trace the
connection between white hats and stocks, to tell what Hecuba was to
them or they to Hecuba, and why they should be more interfered with by
the New York Stock Exchange on the 30th of September than upon any other
day. It is true that during the last summer some slight political bias
was supposed to be hidden beneath that popular headpiece irreverently
styled "a Greeley plug," but then stocks are not politics, nor would any
but a punster trace an intimate connection between hats and polls. A
story has gone through the papers, to be sure, about an unfortunate
deacon who found it impossible to collect the coppers of the
congregation in a Greeley hat, but then slight excuses have been made
available on charitable occasions before the present election, and we
decline to accept the sentiment of that congregation as unmixed devotion
to the Republican candidates. They did not wish to Grant their money,
that was all.

And then, again, unlike the miller of the old conundrum, men generally
wear _white_ hats to keep their heads cool; with which laudable endeavor
why should the Stock Exchange wish to interfere? One never hears of a
"corner" in hats. And then, too, was it the bulls or the bears who
objected to them? Bulls, we all know, have an aversion to scarlet
drapery, but Darwin, in his studies of the feeling for color among
animals, has omitted any references to a horror of white hats even among
the most accomplished of the anthropoid apes.

Pondering all these problems, and many more, our puzzled trio went to
the Stock Exchange on the last day of September. We were conducted into
the safe seclusion of the Visitors' Gallery, from which coign of vantage
we could look down unharmed upon the frantic multitude below. The room
is large and very lofty, its prevailing tint a warm brown, relieved by
bright decorations of the Byzantine order. Across one end runs a small
gallery for visitors, without seats, and some twen