jostled and thronged, a great disgust
descended upon me. The place, the springs of conduct, wearied me,
something in the manner that an educated person is wearied by low
conversation. It seemed to be like this:--that the moral motives of
the living created the atmosphere of the dead therein confined. It was
as if I inhaled the coarse friction, the low aspiration, the
feverishness, the selfishness, the dishonour, that the getting of gain,
when it became the purpose of life, involved. I experienced a sense of
being stifled, and breathed with difficulty; much as those live men
would have done, if the gas-pipes had burst in the street.

It did not detract from this feeling of asphyxia that I was aware of
having, to a certain extent, shared the set of moral compounds which I
now found resolved to their elements, by the curious chemistry of death.

I had loved money and the getting of money, as men of the world, and of
success in it, are apt to do. I was neither better nor worse than
others of my sort. I had speculated with the profits of my profession,
idly enough, but hotly, too, at times. I had told myself that I did
this out of anxiety for the future of my family. I had viewed myself
in the light of the model domestic man, who guards his household
against an evil day. It had never occurred to me to classify myself
with the mere money-changers, into whose atmosphere I had elected to
put myself.

Now, as I glided in and out among them, unseen, unheard, unrecognized,
a spirit among their flesh, there came upon me a humiliating sense of
my true relation to them. Was it thus, I said, or so? Did I this or
that? Was the balance of motives so disproportionate after all? Was
there so little love of wife and child? So much of self and gain? Was
the item of the true so small? The sum of the false so large? Had I
been so much less that was noble, so much more that was low?

I mingled with the mass of haggard men at a large stock auction which
half the street attended. The panic had spread. Sleeplessness and
anxiety had carved the crowding faces with hard chisels. The shouts,
the scramble, the oaths, the clinched hands, the pitiful pushing,
affected me like a dismal spectacular play on some barbarian stage.
How shall I express the sickening aspect of the scene to a man but
newly dead?

The excitement waxed with the morning. The old and placid Santa Ma
throbbed like any little road of yesterday. The stock had