from some place out of town and made a lucky hit in his first
year--mines or something--I forget what. Oh, but you must know that it
takes very little now-a-days to make a full-fledged banker. All you have
to do is to hoist in a safe--through the window, generally, with the
crowd looking on; rail off half the office; scatter some big ledgers
over two or three newly varnished desks; move in a dozen arm-chairs, get
a ticker, a black-board and a boy with a piece of chalk; be pleasant
to every fellow you meet with his own or somebody else's money in his
pocket, and there you are. But we won't talk of these things--it isn't
kind, and, really, I hardly know Breen, and I'm quite sure he wouldn't
know me if he saw me, and he's a very decent gentleman in many ways, I
hear. He never overdraws his account, any way--never tries--and that's
more than I can say for some of his neighbors."

The fog, which earlier in the afternoon had been but a blue haze,
softening the hard outlines of the street, had now settled down in
earnest, choking up the doorways, wiping out the tops of the buildings,
their facades starred here and there with gas-jets, and making a smudged
drawing of the columns of the Custom House opposite.

"Superb, are they not?" said Peter, as he wheeled and stood looking at
the row of monoliths supporting the roof of the huge granite pile, each
column in relief against the dark shadows of the portico. "And they
are never so beautiful to me, my boy, as when the ugly parts of the old
building are lost in the fog. Follow the lines of these watchmen of the
temple! These grave, dignified, majestic columns standing out in the
gloom keeping guard! But it is only a question of time--down they'll
come! See if they don't!"

"They will never dare move them," I protested. "It would be too great a
sacrilege." The best way to get Peter properly started is never to agree
with him.

"Not move them! They will break them up for dock-filling before ten
years are out. They're in the way, my boy; they shut out the light;
can't hang signs on them; can't plaster them over with theatre bills; no
earthly use. 'Wall Street isn't Rome or any other excavated ruin; it's
the centre of the universe'--that's the way the fellows behind these
glass windows talk." Here Peter pointed to the offices of some prominent
bankers, where other belated clerks were still at work under shaded
gas-jets. "These fellows don't want anything classic; they want
somethin