It was blue Monday in Wall Street. It was the beginning of the second week of the most disastrous panic ever known in the history of finance. Capital fled, affrighted, to its strong boxes, and refused to come forth at any rate of interest, or upon any security. Values had been going downward without reaction for six days. The yellings and shoutings in the stock board were such as might have been indulged in by escapees from an asylum for violent lunatics. Fortune after fortune had been swept into the vortex in a vain attempt to stay the current. Stocks which had ranked for years as among the most reliable of investments, descended the grade as rapidly as the “fancies.” Northwestern had fallen from $112 to $60; Western Union from $80 to $45, and Lackawana from $138 to $70, and even at these prices more stock was apparently offered than found purchasers. The conspirators were, apparently, successful. Three men whose combined wealth already aggregated $300,000,000, had produced this storm of disaster merely to increase their millions, regardless of ruined homes. They sold their own stock as they had plotted, seventy-five millions of it at full rates, and seventy-five millions at an average reduction of fifteen per cent, early the preceding week, and before Morning had perfected his arrangements, or appeared upon the scene. Their subsequent short sales were made at lower prices than they had estimated, for others came in competition with them, as vendors. They locked up both the currency received from their sales, and the currency they had borrowed, so effectually that merchants, brokers, and others, who were unable to obtain the usual banking accommodations, were compelled to throw upon the market their holdings of bank, railroad, and telegraph stock. Wolf, who personally led the bear raid in the board, followed prices down with fresh lines of shorts, to an amount beyond that originally intended, and at the close of the previous week, the short sales of the conspirators amounted to $400,000,000. In one particular they had miscalculated, for, after stocks had fallen twenty per cent, the brokers who purchased them refused to loan them again for resale on the customary margin, but believing, or affecting to believe, that prices would advance with greater celerity than they had receded, they demanded an amount of money as margin equal to the difference between the existing market price of the stock loaned and the market price that ruled before the break.