Try as I might to look at the matter in a cold-blooded business way the picture haunted me--the old gentleman proud of his family's long record of sturdy honesty, the old mother's faith in her boy, the wife seeing on each of her children the brand of a felon father, and the husband watching each day's market prices to see whether they had brought him a verdict which meant State's prison or permanent relief from the haunting fear which had become his never-absent shadow; and I read and reread the closing lines of the faithful wife: "Mr. Lawson, you will put Sugar up?--you surely will, just this once--and we will teach the children to pray for you and yours, and God answers this kind of prayers, you know He does." The picture haunted me; I saw it in the market prices; I heard the story in each tick of the ticker and each rustle of the tape; and every time my eye caught "SUG," the stock-exchange abbreviation for Sugar, I winced, as one does at the dentist's probe--well, I could not stand it. I determined to put up Sugar--that is, I determined to try. Little the woman knew what she asked when she wrote: "You will put up Sugar?" She had read that a stock operator works magic, but it had never entered her head that his wand was a stick of dynamite a thousand times concentrated--a stick of dynamite that the law of stock-market averages shows goes off in his hand nine out of every ten times it is handled, and that when it goes off there is nothing more for the handler but the minister, the flowers, and the head-stone; indeed, often the explosion leaves nothing with which to buy even a head-stone! Little she thought that it might strain the wealth of the Bank of England to move Sugar up twelve points. I moved it up, and it went so easy--oh, so easy! that--well, I will let the first description I pick from my scrap-book from among a hundred from the daily press tell the story: [From the _Boston Journal_, March 17, 1899] LAWSON'S LUMP HIS COFFEE SWEETENED WITH QUARTER OF A MILLION--MADE IT IN SUGAR THURSDAY IN TWO HOURS' TRADING A quarter of a million in a day! That was Thomas W. Lawson's record for March 16, 1899. The celebrated "Unthroned King of State Street" was on top of the Sugar market; that is the reason of it all. Sugar was the big card of stock speculation yesterday. Indeed, the stock had one of the wildest days in its history, and its high price--$170--reached amid great excitement--is the highest on record. The speculation was something tremendous, and it has been through the speculation that the people who have been under the impression that the markets were drifting into a dull and uninteresting condition have had a sudden awakening.