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There is no place of business, indeed, so pictorial as Wall Street.
Sunk down amid huge buildings which wall it in like precipices, with a
graveyard yawning at its head and a river surging at its feet, its
pavement teeming with an eager, nervous multitude, its street rattling
with trucks laden with gold and silver bricks, its soil mined with
treasure vaults and private wires, its skyline festooned with ticker
tape, its historic sense vindicated by the heroic statue of Washington
standing in majestic serenity on the portico of that most exquisite
model of the Parthenon, and with the solemn sarcasm of the stately
brown church, backed by its crumbling tombstones, lifting its slender
spire like a prophetic warning finger in its pathway--this most
impressive and pompous of thoroughfares is at once serious and lively,
solid and vivacious. You say to yourself this must be a vast business
which is so grandly domiciled; and you wonder if the men live up to
the buildings.

The broker, in fact, who fills the eye of pictorial satire and the
country press, is not an admirable object. His tall hat and shiny
boots are in too obvious a foreground in sketches of race meetings,
uptown cafes and flash clubs. He is represented as a maddened savage
on 'Change, and a reckless debauchee at leisure, who analyzes the
operations of finance in the language of a monte dealer describing a
prize fight, and whose notion of a successful career is something
between a gambler, a revolutionist and a buccaneer. He is supposed to
vibrate in cheerful nonchalance between Delmonico's and a beanery,
according as he is in funds or hard up, and to exhibit a genial
assurance that "a member of the New York Stock Exchange, sir," will
prove a pleasant addition to the most exclusive circles.

This happy-go-lucky gentleman, however, to use one of his own
delightful metaphors, "cuts very little ice" in the region where he is
believed to exert himself most effectively. He is really but the
froth, riding lightly on the speculative current. Still, I have placed
him, like Uriah, "in the forefront of the battle," while we draw back
a little, because he is the caricature of that stocking-broking
man-about-town Wall Street has had the honor to create, and because in
popular fancy he is seen standing, like Washington, before the doors
of the Stock Exchange, with a gold pencil in one hand and a pad in the
other, ready to pounce on the pocketbooks of parsons and
schoolmis