nd insolvent institutions. Still, things
were slowly improving, for the telegraph had facilitated stock-market
quotations, not only between New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, but
between a local broker's office in Philadelphia and his stock
exchange. In other words, the short private wire had been introduced.
Communication was quicker and freer, and daily grew better.

Railroads had been built to the South, East, North, and West. There was
as yet no stock-ticker and no telephone, and the clearing-house had only
recently been thought of in New York, and had not yet been introduced in
Philadelphia. Instead of a clearing-house service, messengers ran daily
between banks and brokerage firms, balancing accounts on pass-books,
exchanging bills, and, once a week, transferring the gold coin, which
was the only thing that could be accepted for balances due, since there
was no stable national currency. "On 'change," when the gong struck
announcing the close of the day's business, a company of young men,
known as "settlement clerks," after a system borrowed from London,
gathered in the center of the room and compared or gathered the various
trades of the day in a ring, thus eliminating all those sales and
resales between certain firms which naturally canceled each other. They
carried long account books, and called out the transactions--"Delaware
and Maryland sold to Beaumont and Company," "Delware and Maryland sold
to Tighe and Company," and so on. This simplified the bookkeeping of
the various firms, and made for quicker and more stirring commercial
transactions.

Seats "on 'change" sold for two thousand dollars each. The members of
the exchange had just passed rules limiting the trading to the hours
between ten and three (before this they had been any time between
morning and midnight), and had fixed the rates at which brokers could do
business, in the face of cut-throat schemes which had previously held.
Severe penalties were fixed for those who failed to obey. In other
words, things were shaping up for a great 'change business, and Edward
Tighe felt, with other brokers, that there was a great future ahead.

Chapter VI

The Cowperwood family was by this time established in its new and larger
and more tastefully furnished house on North Front Street, facing the
river. The house was four stories tall and stood twenty-five feet on the
street front, without a yard.

Here the family began to entertain in a small way,