adictions, some philosophers have said that there may be somewhere
outside of these two material centres another power that keeps affairs
moving along with some steadiness.

This noble Chamber has a large irregular area of floor space, is very
high, and has running round three sides a narrow elevated gallery, from
which spectators can look down upon the throng below. Upon a raised dais
at one side sits the presiding genius of the place, who rules very much
as Jupiter was supposed to govern the earthly swarms, by letting things
run and occasionally launching a thunderbolt. High up on one side, in an
Olympian seclusion, away from the noise and the strife, sits a Board,
calm as fate, and panoplied in the responsibility of chance, whose
function seems to be that of switch-shifters in their windowed cubby at a
network of railway intersections--to prevent collisions.

At both ends of the floor and along one side are narrow railed-off spaces
full of clerks figuring at desks, of telegraph operators clicking their
machines, of messenger-boys arriving and departing in haste, of
unprivileged operators nervously watching the scene and waiting the
chance of a word with some one on the floor; through noiseless swinging
doors men are entering and departing every moment--men in a hurry, men
with anxious faces, conscious that the fate of the country is in their
hands. On the floor itself are five hundred, perhaps a thousand, men,
gathered for the most part in small groups about little stands upon the
summit of which is a rallying legend, talking, laughing, screaming,
good-natured, indifferent, excited, running hither and thither in
response to changing figures in the checker-board squares on the great
wall opposite--calm, cynical one moment, the next violently agitated,
shouting, gesticulating, rushing together, shaking their fists in a
tumult of passion which presently subsides.

The swarms ebb and flow about these little stands--bees, not bringing any
honey, but attracted to the hive where it is rumored most honey is to be
had. By habit some always stand or sit about a particular hive, waiting
for the show of comb. By-and-by there is a stir; the crowd thickens; one
beardless youth shouts out the figure "one-half"; another howls,
"three-eighths." The first one nods. It is done. The electric wire
running up the stand quivers and takes the figure, passes it to all the
other wires, transmits it to every office and hotel in the city, to a