the summer on their yachts or their Long Island estates.

And in every man's hand or pocket was a newspaper.

They were scarcely worth reading for mere pleasure, these New York
newspapers; indeed, there was scarcely anything in them to read except a
daily record of the steady decline in securities of every description;
paragraphs noting the passing of dividends; columns setting forth
minutely the opinions of very wealthy men concerning the business
outlook; chronicles in detail of suits brought against railroads and
against great industrial corporations; accounts of inquiries by State
and by Federal authorities into combinations resulting in an alleged
violation of various laws.

Here and there a failure of some bucket-branded broker was noted--the
reports echoing like the first dropping shots along the firing line.

Even to the most casual and uninterested outsider it was evident that
already the metropolis was under a tension; that the tension was
increasing almost imperceptibly day by day; that there seemed to be no
very clear idea as to the reason of it, only a confused apprehension, an
apparently unreassuring fear of some grotesque danger ahead, which daily
reading of the newspapers was not at all calculated to allay.

Of course there were precise reasons for impending trouble given and
reiterated by those amateurs of finance and politics whose opinions are
at the disposal of the newspaper-reading public.

Prolixity characterised these solemn utterances, packed full of cant
phrases such as "undigested securities" and "the treacherous attack on
the nation's integrity."

Two principal reasons were given for the local financial uneasiness; and
the one made the other ridiculous--first, that the nation's Executive
was mad as Nero and had deliberately begun a senseless holocaust
involving the entire nation; the other that a "panic" was due, anyway.
It resembled the logic of the White Queen of immortal memory, who began
screaming before she pricked her finger in order to save herself any
emotion after the pin had drawn blood.

Men knew in their hearts that there was no real reason for impending
trouble; that this menace was an unreal thing, intangible, without
substance--only a shadow cast by their own assininity.

Yet shadows can be made real property when authority so ordains. Because
there was once a man with a donkey who met a stranger in the desert.

The stranger bargained for and bought the donkey; the lat