has quitted school and entered the office of a thrifty
broker--perhaps a warm friend of his father, who hugs the keenly
American doctrine that a youth should be put in the way of piling
dollars together as quickly as possible after he leaves the
educational leash. By degrees this young man will discover that the
only difference between Wall Street and a huge, crowd-engirt
gaming-table is one between simplicity and complexity. He will see
that the play of the former is far more difficult to learn and that it
requires a number of _croupiers_ instead of one. He will see that
these _croupiers_ are in most cases men whose names posterity will
hand down, if it hands them down at all, as those of stony egotists,
and sometimes of gigantic thieves. He will gradually gain insight into
certain of their methods, as when, only a few years back, one or two
of them seized an entire railroad under cover of what was the merest
parody of purchase and opposed both to law and to public policy,
afterward defending their outrage in the courts through the brazen aid
of venal judges and bringing to Albany (headquarters of their
attempted theft) a great carload of New York ruffians, each with a
proxy in his soiled and desperate hand--an instrument almost as
illegal as the pistol which those hands had doubtless too often
fingered if not fired amid the squalor of their owners' native
slums.[1]

[1] It is a fact that the late James Fisk, Jr., was
appointed by Judge Barnard, of New York, receiver of a
railway (the Albany and Susquehanna) which lay a hundred
miles outside of that magistrate's judicial district.

The neophyte in speculators' creeds and customs may amuse himself,
however, with reminiscences like the preceding only in a sense of that
proud historic retrospect which concerns past radiant records of "the
street." He may, if so minded, con other pages of its noble archives,
and dazzle his young brain with admiration for the shining exploits of
"Black Friday," an occasion when greed held one of its most sickening
revels, and a clique of merciless financiers gathered together so many
millions of gold coin that its price bred fright among the holders of
depreciating stocks. Agony, ruin, the demolition of firesides,
resulted from this infamous "corner" wrought by a league of miserly
zealots. But our young student of Wall Street annals will soon
harden his nerves against any silly commiseration. As well s