g gong sounded from the president's
gallery on every promise of a quiet day. Here in Money's cardinal
nerve-center there had been inevitable rumblings of future eruptions
from pent-up apprehensions of panic, but this morning the spring sun
came laughing through the great windows at the east and the idle brokers
laughed back.

The psychology of this mart where the world trades with neither counter
nor show-case nor tangible wares is fitful. It responds nervously and
swiftly to the gloom of fog or the smile of sun, as well as to the
pulse-beat of the telegraph. Around the sixteen "posts" where the little
army of operators drifted as idly as though they met there by chance, no
urgency of business manifested itself. But back of this tricky calm hung
a cloud of anxiety. A sense of delicate balance, which a gust might
capsize, lay at the back of each mind, troubling it with vague
forebodings. Conditions were ripe for sudden hysteria. Meanwhile
well-groomed young men in pongee office coats and their equally sleek
elders killed time with newspapers or resumed threads of conversation
broken off at parting last night in drawing-room or theater-foyer. The
circular benches around the posts blossomed with magazines and a group
formed about two brokers who gravely fought out chess problems on a
pocket board. Noise of a sort there was, for on the floor of the
Exchange a "quiet" day is not as a quiet day elsewhere. Unimportant bids
and sales elicited sporadic shouts and clamor, but for the most part
these demonstrations were tinged with laughter and badinage. Seemingly
the membership of Finance's College of Cardinals was skylarking with
indecorous levity. Activity of a sort there was, too, as the litter of
torn-up slips and memoranda on the floor attested. Yet the silent goings
and comings of the floor attendants in their cadet-gray livery were
placid, and for that environment unhurried. Around none of the posts
surged the pandemonium of real activity and the two great blackboards
that break the marble whiteness of the walls at the north and south
twinkled no feverish signals from brokerage offices to floor operators.

But within two hours the smile of the spring sun died behind a cloud and
a rumor insinuatingly whispered itself about the floor. Magnet-wise it
drew men from scattered points into focal groups and panic-wise it
stamped a growing apprehension on faces that had been expressionless.

"Where did this ridiculous canard orig