d with great enthusiasm. He put his soul into it, and
when Mr. Gallivant's soul got into anything it straightway began to hum.
Mr. Gallivant's soul was in many respects similar to a Corliss engine.

Just now, Mr. Gallivant was in very poor circumstances--a condition of
things all the more hardly felt because it succeeded, and succeeded
suddenly, upon a period of bewildering prosperity. Early in the year
1888 it was observed that Mr. Gallivant's dark red mustaches were
curling away at the ends with a lightness and vivacity that they only
displayed when things were going well. The quality of the curl in the
ends of his mustaches invariably indicated to his friends the state of
the market. They could tell exactly whether stocks were up or down and
how much so. The sensitive rhododendron is not more surely responsive to
the temperature of its environment than was the curl in Mr. Gallivant's
mustaches to the tale of the ticker.

In no other way, mark you, did he reveal his interest in the Street and
its doings. By not a single quaver was the cheeriness of his snatchy,
racy, merry voice affected. By not the fraction of an inch nor a second
was his gay little trot altered. But when the ends of his mustache stood
out straight, his friends, no matter how slight was their acquaintance
with financial matters, knew they were safe in concluding that the
country was going to the dogs, while, on the other hand, when those same
mustaches finished off in a sprightly little twist, the fact that we
were living under a wise and beneficent dispensation was too clear for
argument.

Early in 1888, as I said before, Mr. Gallivant's mustaches began to
curl. They became elastic. They twisted themselves this way and that in
graceful good-humor. They twined themselves lovingly about his nose and
danced in constant ecstasy. Mr. Gallivant's office in the Equitable
Building saw less and less of him. He left his lodgings in Harlem and
took a suite of large and beautiful apartments in a fashionable hotel.
Every afternoon he drove a pair of superb black horses over the
Boulevard and through the Park. All his friends were happy. They asked
and it was given them. He lavished diamond buttons and scarf-pins among
them as if he were a prince and they were pugilists. He got up a party
and made a palace-car excursion to the Yellowstone Park. He purchased a
stock-farm in California. He hired a steam yacht and cruised in the
Baltic. From the middle of March un