w it, and time to run
over to Fred Eberlin's and have Frank mix you a cocktail.

But aside from a profitable acquaintance with values, I know of no
place equal to a stockbroking office for the acquirement of that
general and intimate knowledge of men and of the town, which,
organized and classified, constitutes the science of life. Here
congregate men of every conceivable calling and character, all meeting
on the equal and easy terms of a reputable pursuit, and all more or
less under the influence of the natural and perfectly selfish ambition
of money making.

One has only to observe them to be instructed. They are well groomed.
They are rosy and plump. Any one of them evidently could sit down at
the desk and write you a check any minute. Whatever they may be
elsewhere, whether their private lives are distinguished and
benevolent or riotous and shameless, whether their margins are the
fruit of admirable diligence or the purloined inheritance of the widow
and the orphan, while they are here these men are capitalists. They
have the feelings, the ideals, the desires and fears of the rich.

Here is a railway president amusing himself taking a flier in sugar,
while he waits for his steamer. He is chatting with a tobacco
manufacturer who sold out to the Trust. On that sofa by the window
Jerry Jackson, the bookmaker, is whispering a point to a man of
pleasure from the Knickerbocker Club. There is a clergyman from
Chelsea Seminary talking to a doctor smelling of iodoform. The two
tall gentlemen laughing with the manager are lawyers who will be
scowling fiercely at each other presently before Recorder Goff.

The man with his hand in a bag is a mine owner from Colorado, showing
a copper specimen to a dry-goods merchant on his way to the Custom
House. The man with his nose glued to the ticker globe is a
professional operator who trades from the tape. And that
hungry-looking person who has just rushed in is a bankrupt tipster,
making a precarious and pitiful existence, like a woman of the town,
out of the means of his ruin.

Graduates of Oxford and alumni of Harvard rub elbows with City Hall
politicians, and farmers from Kansas and Pennsylvania exchange market
opinions with men of science.

It is only for short intervals that the customers in broking offices
can be busy. At other times they must lounge, and smoke; and chat, and
read, and watch the board. A good-sized concern may easily have two
hundred running accounts. Can