98 WALL STREET AND THE WILDS 



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sand gold until, the delivery hour having passed, 

 memories and memorandums were consulted 

 while checks were drawn and collected amounting 

 to hundreds of thousands of dollars and long 

 breaths of relief were drawn each day when the 

 tangle had been straightened out and a rough cal- 

 culation showed that no bags of gold had been 

 lost in the shuffle. We had plenty of scares and 

 some dramatic escapes, the account of some of 

 which will appear elsewhere in this writing. 



As in the day of financial depression I stood 

 apart from my fellows, so amid the pseans of 

 commercial thanksgiving as expressed in the ad- 

 vancing value of our currency as compared with 

 gold, I felt that like Ishmael my hand was against 

 every man and every man's hand against mine. 

 I do not defend the ethics of the game I played, 

 so nearly alone, but the spirit of youth stirs my 

 blood as the vitagraph of memory reviews the 

 battlefields of the Gold Exchange. The natural 

 scarcity of gold as the falling price drove it from 

 the market while the increasing demand from the 

 bears put a daily premium on its use, gave us 





