for a poetical comment; but he added: "When
this is done, every vehicle will have to wear sleigh-bells as in
sleighing times, and Broadway will be so quiet that you can pay a
compliment to a lady, in passing, and she will hear you." This was
nothing in itself; but here was a man wrestling with fate in a cellar,
who could turn you out two hundred such paragraphs a week, the year
round. Many men can growl in a cellar; this man could laugh, and keep
laughing, and make the floating population of a city laugh with him.
It must be owned, too, that he had a little real insight into the
nature of things around him,--a little Scotch sense, as well as an
inexhaustible fund of French vivacity. Alluding, once, to the "hard
money" cry, by which the lying politicians of the day carried
elections, he exploded that nonsense in two lines: "If a man gets the
wearable or the eatable he wants, what cares he whether he has gold or
paper-money?" He devoted two sentences to the Old School and New
School Presbyterian controversy: "Great trouble among the
Presbyterians just now. The question in dispute is, whether or not a
man can do anything towards saving his own soul." He had, also, an
article upon the Methodists, in which he said that the two religions
nearest akin were the Methodist and the Roman Catholic. We should add
to these trifling specimens the fact, that he uniformly maintained,
from 1835 to the crash of 1837, that the prosperity of the country was
unreal, and would end in disaster. Perhaps we can afford space for a
single specimen of his way of treating this subject; although it can
be fully appreciated only by those who are old enough to remember the
rage for land speculation which prevailed in 1836:--

"THE RICH POOR--THE POOR RICH.--'I have made $50,000 since
last January,' said one of these real-estate speculators to
a friend.

"'The dense you have,' said the other, looking up in
astonishment 'Why, last January you were not worth a
twenty-dollar bill.'

"'I know that; but I now calculate I'm worth full $50,000,
if not $60,000.'

"How have you made it?'

"'By speculating in real estate. I bought three hundred lots
at Goose Island at $150 apiece; they are now worth $400. I
would not sell them for $350 apiece, I assure you.'

"' Do you think so?'

"'Sartain. I have two hundred and fifty lots at Blockhead's
Point, worth $150 a piece; some on them