broker likes to talk about his trades over his after-dinner
cigar, and to tell you, in the horsy, professional jargon of the
Street, how he "pulled a thousand out of 'Paul,' and went home long of
'little Atch.'"

He is, like all nervous people, a social animal. He is gregarious by
instinct and interest. Accustomed all day long to his exciting pursuit
and his club-parlor office, he seeks society for amusement and profit.
He wishes to chat with his friends and to increase his following. He
has no wares to display. He has no monetary advantage to offer over
any of the other seven or eight hundred commission men in the
Exchange. All members must charge one-eighth of one per cent, per
hundred shares, each way. Interest charges can't be very much reduced.

Every broker in Wall Street has inside information of some kind. His
appeal, therefore, for commissions must rest on acquaintance and
personality. He must know how to stimulate cupidity and create
confidence. He must impress himself on as many people as possible as
successful, honest, jolly, shrewd, well informed; a capital fellow and
a first-rate business man. It is only fair to him to remark that
whatever his faults, he almost invariably is a capital fellow and a
first-rate business man. But is it extraordinary that this individual
should become a man's man, a man about town?

Whether he is the blatant, vulgar wretch of the caricaturist, or the
cultivated, polished person who justifies Wall Street's boast of being
the aristocracy of trade, depends, of course, not on his being a
broker, but on his being a gentleman.

His completed portrait, however, would be a too ambitious performance
for the limits of my sketch, and I have made this little office study
of him, as he leans against his ticker pinching the tape, with bits of
board-room paper falling off his hat and a cigar between his teeth,
simply to show the influence of his vocation on himself and on his
companions.

The flavor of speculation permeates Wall Street like soot, and settles
on the professional and the public alike. It is a sporty business. It
appeals to the idle, the reckless, the prodigal and the _declasse_. In
the quickness and uncertainty of its evolutions, it is unfortunately
so analogous to racing and gaming that their terms are interchangeable,
and to the thoughtless the stock market is the ranking evil in that
unholy trinity.

"Stocks, papers and ponies," is the ringside slang for Wall Street,