Here is the force of the sea and the romance of a fairy tale. Here immense fortunes are won in a day and lost in less, and the hopes and savings of years vanish in an hour. Here are bank messengers who become millionnaires overnight and capitalists who awake penniless. It is the market of the whole country and of others. Here are corn and wheat heaped in huge confusion, millions of bales of cotton and barrels of oil, high-piled above the sky-scrapers. Railroads, steamers, banks and bullion; raw gold and ore, coal, silver and copper, mounting to the clouds in glimmering pinnacles and smoking hills. And through it all and around it all, pulses the restless swing and change, the tireless tide of "the street."

And the traders! Giants and pygmies. Tumbling over each other, swarming, pushing, struggling. Here holding up a million head of cattle to the highest bidder, there beating down the price of a small nation. here is a man beaten by a crowd for buying oil and there is another lying dead because he sold it. And away over there runs a little man who has succeeded in stealing a pig and is now scurrying off with it to safety.

This mountainous market of hopes and of nations, of success and failure, of tragedy and comedy, of ships, steam, mines, and the lives of men, towering phantom-like and vast, — is Wall Street.