ness with them, have gone. The heaps of gold are stored away within vaults of stone and bars of iron, and not the clink of a dollar is heard. The exchanges are closed, and the street is no longer musical with the gamut of percentage. The bell of Old Trinity now is heard tolling each passing hour, but there are few to listen to its warning voice. There are none who pass the night in Wall Street but the armed watchmen of the banks and a few trusted servitors. Nothing can be more dismal than an evening's walk through this deserted thoroughfare. There is no step heard but the measured pace of the policeman, and the great buildings, without a light of their own, and barely visible by the street gas-lamps, throw their tall shadows across the pathway, deepening the darkness, and making the stillness, as it were, more manifest.

enormous.

The daily money transactions of Wall Street are Fifty millions a day is not an exaggerated estimate of those made public; say forty millions for the gold exchanges, eight millions for the receipts and payments at the Government Treasury, and two millions for tribute at the Custom-house, and the purchase and sale of the various stocks. This would give for the whole year the vast sum of fifteen thousand millions. To this must be added the amount of private transactions, which are also exceedingly great, amounting, probably, to some hundred millions annually.

It might seem that a street so gorged with wealth would need be carefully guarded; but it is surprising with what an apparent mutual confidence each day's business among such heaps of money is carried on. At night, the main reliance is on the iron-clad safe, and the mysterious complications of lock and key; and these have, alas! on many occasions, proved more trusty than man. The robberies, of late years, have been more frequent during the day than the night, and have been effected rather through address than by violence. One of the latest examples is that of the robbing in full daylight of a wealthy proprietor, of whom bonds amounting to a million or so were taken out of his iron safe, after having been opened by himself, and while it remained within reach of his own arm.

less eager

The garrisoning of Wall Street is one of the reminiscences of the late civil war. The upper part of the city was in possession of a mob no for plunder than a thirst for blood. The treasure of Wall Street was in danger. The commander of the navy yard accordingly so anchored an armed steamer in the river that its broadsides could sweep the whole street, and posted squads of sailors and marines with cannon in the halls and on the steps of the Treasury and Custom

house, and at all the corners. Wall Street passed through the civic crisis untouched.

Republican taste has vindicated its right to individual freedom in the architecture of Wall Street, as elsewhere in New York. There are no two structures of equal height or of the same style, and the materials of the buildings are as diversified as their forms. White marble, granite, brown, yellow, Nova Scotian, Portland, and Caen stones, stucco and brick, give a wonderfully vari-coloured aspect to the whole street. The clear American atmosphere, moreover, gives to the irregular outline of the houses the sharpness of an architectural drawing, and to their surface the brilliancy and distinctness of tint of an arabesque carpet. Though many of the structures are plainly and solidly built, and well adapted to their purpose, there are too many ambitious attempts at the classical in art. Thus, tall Grecian porticoes often lead to dingy back-parlours, and mock Parthenons echo with the noisy barter of the moneychanger and the stock-jobber

The Treasury building is an imposing structure of white marble, with columns that might have upheld the roof of a Grecian or Roman temple. Quiet reigns within its lofty walls of stone, save on dividend. days, when impatient throngs stretch and keep pushing through its lengthened hall from morning to night.

The Custom-house, an ugly and inconvenient building of granite, with a great range of fatiguing steps and darkening pillars, is a busy place. Here is collected the chief portion of the whole revenue derived by the United States from its inordinate tariff. The collector, who is the chief of the Custom-house, has an office for which there is a greater political struggle than for the Presidency. He is appointed by the President, and is generally one of his most devoted partisans. His salary is not very large, but the appurtenances are so great that no one who once obtains the office need to enjoy it longer than a few years to secure a handsome fortune. The subordinate places, though professedly created for the public benefit, are so many hundreds of snug retreats ceded to political partisans in reward for past services, or in expectation of future ones.

The chief interest, however, of the street attaches to the stockbrokers. They, too, are installed in a grandiose structure of white marble, with porches of Corinthian columns, and florid entablatures. The main front of the building faces in Broad, but it has also an entrance in Wall Street, as tall and portly, though less spacious than that from the former. The structure was raised by an association composed exclusively of stock-brokers, and cost seven hundred thousand

dollars, of which three hundred thousand were given by the Board, which only asked in return a few simple exclusive privileges. The building is spacious, and is composed of four main compartments-the Brokers' Room, the Long Room, the Government, and the Gold Exchanges.

The Brokers' Room, for which they pay the annual rent of twentyfive thousand dollars, is a spacious hall, well proportioned and handsomely adorned. It has hangings of green tapestry and wainscotings, and furniture of American black walnut wood. The arrangement is not unlike the hall of a legislative assembly. At the upper end of the room there is a long rostrum, where the presiding officer, the secretaries, and reporters have their desks; on the wall above them hang the portraits of two veteran brokers, and on one side is a black board for the register of prices. Just below the rostrum is a sunken oval space, entered by a few descending steps, and supplied with a long table. This is facetiously termed, by the members of the board, whose fancies are naturally gamey, the "cock pit."

The main body of the hall is enclosed within an iron railing, and supplied with well-stuffed chairs of morocco and walnut. Here may sit the five hundred members who compose the board of brokers; may, we say, for it is seldom these mercurial gentlemen avail themselves of this sedentary privilege. Around the railing there is a wide passage which is generally thronged by men of eager face, most of whom are either decayed brokers, in whom the spirit of stock-jobbing still lives, or "outside" speculators anxious to anticipate the fate of their day's venture in Erie, Rock Island, or what not.

The board of brokers is an organized association, with the legal title of "The New York Stock Exchange." It has a president, two vice-presidents, a treasurer, secretary, assistant-secretary, and rollkeeper. Members are chosen by ballot, and on being elected pay an admission fee of 3000 dollars. The office of the president is but an honorary one. The vice-presidents are the working men, and are paid a salary. The first receives ten thousand dollars, and his chief duty is to preside at each morning session of the board from half-past ten to twelve o'clock, and call out the list of stocks. The second vicepresident has the same duty to perform at the evening session, which has but the brief duration of a half-hour, from half-past two to three o'clock.

On the stock list there are no less than two hundred and ninetynine different kinds of stocks. Of these sixty-six are state and city securities; sixty-five are bank stock shares, one hundred and forty-one railroads (fifty-eight being stock, and eighty-three bonds), and twenty

The first vice-presi

seven which are classified as 66 miscellaneous."* dent, whose duty it is to call out each one of these, and some of them over and over again, at the highest pitch of his voice, so as to be heard in the noisiest assembly of the world, has no sinecure. It is a marvel how human throat and lungs can stand this test of their durability for nearly two mortal hours, unless the one is made of caoutchouc, and the other clad with iron.

There is no pretension to order, or if so, no practice of it. When a stock much dealt in is called, the excitement is furious. The members rush from their seats to the cock-pit, throw up their hands in violent gesture, contort their faces with expressions both savage and grotesque, and bawl out their offers to buy or sell with a vehemence and variety of voice that can only be compared to the roaring and crying of a whole menagerie of lions, tigers, hyænas, and jackals at feeding time. The assembly seems possessed, as it were, with a demoniacal rage. Doré might have here spared his fantastic imagination an effort, and by merely the use of his ready crayon, caught a scene for the "Inferno" of Dante.

During the momentary pauses between these scenes of excitement, there is a general relaxation, as if the tension were too great for human endurance. Then every one unbends, and gives full play to the fun and mischief of his nature. Young and old seem to become boys again, and indulge in all kinds of pranks without respect to age or person. Hats are knocked off, paper pellets thrown fast and thick, and nicknames and slang words bandied from one to the other. All sense of decorum is lost, but Propriety ceases to censure, in the case of the broker, whose business, of intense excitement, seems to require the relief of the loose, boisterousness of boyish fun. With all his relaxation the doctor still classes him among the least manageable of his patients, as his nerves, when once attacked by disease, being worn and weakened by excessive tension and use, want the elasticity requisite for easy restoration to health.

In the room within the same building, where gold and Government securities are dealt in, similar scenes are displayed to those in the Stock Exchange. It is in the "Long Room," however, where the greatest excitement and turmoil prevail. Here there is no pretence of the least organization. There is a great crowd of furious speculators, principally "outsiders," as they are called, but many of them belong to the regular board of brokers, pushing to and fro in inextricable con* U.S. Government Securities are thirty-five in number. They are bought and sold in a separate compartment.

fusion, gesticulating violently, and shouting loudly their offers to buy or sell. In wet weather they cram themselves within the hall, which, spacious as it may be, is hardly able to contain the great throng. At other times they overflow into the street, obstructing the side-walks and carriage-road, and even filling the doorways and high steps of the neighbouring houses. The whole thoroughfare then swells with a billowy mass of struggling and vociferous human beings, or rather stock speculators, and rings from one end to the other with the opposing cries of buyers and sellers of the various stocks.

America is a country of boundless expectation, and naturally encourages the spirit of speculation. The prizes of life, moreover, are more abounding and more easily won than elsewhere. A sanguine temper is thus engendered in the people, who are always hopeful of fortune, and ready to risk the chances of acquiring it. The American is accused of an over-fondness for the dollar. This may

be true, but his passion for money is rather that of the prodigal than of the miser. He seeks it not for saving, but for spending. No one pours it out as profusely as he. This eagerness for acquisition, joined to freedom of expenditure, while it gives the desire for fortune, supplies the means necessary to obtain it. The country, too, with its boundless "woods and pastures new," offers such inexhaustible resources to enterprise that failure in one place is almost sure of being compensated by success in another. Misfortune in America is much less a misfortune than elsewhere. The American, conscious of the readiness with which he can reinstate himself after he has lost all, is less unwilling to put that all to risk. He is accordingly a bold speculator.

The rage of speculation in Wall Street is not equalled by that of the Parisian Bourse, or London Stock Exchange. Such daring ventures and alternations of fortune have not been known since the South Sea Bubble of France, or the Railway Mania of England.

During the war, between the years 1862 and 1864, it is said that fully three hundred millions of dollars were gained by the successful Wall Street speculators in stocks, the price of some of which rose 300 per cent. A broker's commission for a single day amounted to five thousand dollars-an enormous sum, as he was only paid one quarter of one per cent. on the par value of all he bought. The spirit of speculation was so intense and so general that women pawned their jewels, and staked the money on stocks. Wall Street and its byways were so filled with frantic speculators of all kinds, that the police could hardly keep the thoroughfares clear and preserve the public order.

Poverty was suddenly raised to opulence. A drayman began with a