80 WALL STREET AND THE WILDS 



It is without thought of satire or levity that I 

 recall the many occasions when he closed the 

 door of our private office to give thanks to God 

 for the wonderful gift He had bestowed upon me. 

 But the gift was not what he, and others, per- 

 sisted in thinking it. I had no keen perception 

 of the trend of prices, no intuition of what the 

 next turn was to be. Whatever I did was in the 

 line of mathematics and not of impulse. The 

 work was mechanical, and a machine could have 

 done it better than I. Always I was buying 

 when I felt like selling and selling when every 

 impulse impelled me to buy. 



I have already written of the ebb and flow of 

 the tide in the price of gold and of the cash I 

 coined through some crude calculation of its 

 periodicity. But the action of this tide was slow 

 and though as certain as the beat of a pendulum, 

 the arc through which it swung was governed by 

 human hopes and fears not easily estimated. As 

 on the Gulf Coast an adverse gale piles high the 

 waters, holding them back for days, so political, 

 commercial, or financial bugbears, threatening 



