tresses.

Parsons and schoolmistresses actually do come to Wall Street; all the
world comes here, incorporates its idioms into its dialect and is
infected with its spirit. It is a lounge for men of pleasure, a study
for men of learning, an El Dorado for men of adventure, and a market
for men of business. It has a habitat and a manner, a character and a
vernacular. It bristles with incongruity and contradiction, yet it is
as logical as a syllogism.

Superficially, everything is manipulation, chance, accident. Really,
every fluctuation is regulated by laws of science, and, with adequate
knowledge and just deduction, profit is not speculative but certain.
It is this which differentiates it from all mere gambling. And it is
this union of impulse and logic which makes it so human, so humorous,
so dramatic and pathetic.

Perhaps its most curious incongruity is its combination of secrecy and
frankness. The atmosphere about the Stock Exchange fairly palpitates
with suspicion and subterfuge. No man knows what another man is about,
and every man bends his energy to find out. "Inside information" is
the philosopher's stone that turns every fraction into golden units.
The leading firms take the greatest pains to conceal their dealings.
Orders are given in cipher. Certificates are registered in the names
of clerks. Large blocks of stock are bought, and sold, and "crossed,"
for the mere purpose of misleading. A wink or a shrug is accepted as
more significant than the most positive assertion. The disposition to
"copper a point" is so general that the late Mr. Gould used to say he
always told the truth, because nobody ever believed him.

The very penny chroniclers of the market acquire an infelicitous
adroitness in the phraseology of deceit. And yet nowhere on earth is
ignorance so carefully counseled and so almost ludicrously warned as
in this place of trickery and innuendo.

What conceivable enterprise which expected to exist on public
patronage would assume as the unofficial metaphor of dealings a pair
of wild beasts bellowing and growling over the carcass of a lamb, and
make this most helpless and stupid of animals the representation of
the customer? To call a trader a lamb is as opprobrious an epithet as
it was to call a Norman baron an Englishman.

In any other business the buyer is an honored and privileged patron;
in Wall Street he is welcomed with the respect and pleasure that was
exhibited to a bailiff serving a writ i