so bright and
intelligent, as a rule, that you wonder why he is so phenomenally
vulgar. But his brightness and intelligence are of the quality, nearly
always, that throws into hysteric giggles the "summer girl" on piazzas
of third-rate hotels. Ordinarily, too, he has not the faintest
conception of how deeply and darkly he bores people who would live
apart from him, from his bejewelled and supercilious wife (her pretty
head always goes an inch further backward when "Tom" or "Dick" has
"made a strike in stocks"), and from the French maid, with her frilled
cap, whom his children gabble to in their grammarless American-French,
but whose unctuous idioms are Sanscrit alike to madame and himself.

Conceive that you or I shall wish to talk with the ordinary Wall
Street man, on the piazza of his watering-place hotel, on the deck of
his record-breaking steamer. (When he goes to Europe, which he
incessantly does, he invariably takes a record-breaking steamer in
preference to all others.) What does he know? What can he tell us?
Politics? He reproduces, if he be a Republican, the last tirade of his
favorite newspaper in behalf of protection and Mr. Blaine. If he be a
Democrat he will spout the last editorial of his favorite newspaper in
favor of free trade and Mr. Cleveland. History? The Wall Street man
rarely knows in what year Columbus discovered America, and would be in
straits wild enough to horrify that talented arch-prig, Mr. Andrew
Lang, if you mentioned either Cortes or Pizarro. Fiction? He admired
Robinson Crusoe when a boy, and since then he has read a few
translated volumes of Dumas the elder. Poetry? He doesn't like it "for
a cent"; but he once did come across something (by Tennyson or
Longfellow--he forgets which) called "Beautiful Snow." That "fetched
him," and "laid over" any other verse he recollects.

Here, let us insist, is no aimless travesty of the average Wall Street
man, but a faithful etching of him, apart from those more sorry
lineaments which might be disclosed in a portrait painted, as it were,
with the oil of his own slippery speculations. If he resents the
honest drawing of his well-known features, why, so much the better.
His indignation may be fraught with wholesome reactions. Perhaps he
will have his defenders--interested ones, of course. We may pluck the
cactus-flower with hands cased in buckskin, and swear that it harbors
no sting below its roseate and silken cockade of bloom. Prejudice is
too oft