exclaimed Horace; and depend upon it, if stocks were the subject of traffic in Rome, he had just been nicked when he wrote that passage. Most courteous reader, I was doomed to suffer another grievous disappointment; stocks took a different turn from what I had expected. The storm cleared away, and the panic abated. The sun again shone out bright, and smiles reappeared on the brokers’ faces. Prices had reached their lowest point, precisely at the moment that I sold out mine, and instead of going down to ninety, as they would have done had I continued to hold, they “rallied,” as the saying is, and rose to par. I looked and felt _blue_, and counted over my money again and again; I ciphered and calculated for half a morning, in endeavoring to make my loss less than it was. It was of no use, however, for the result of my counting and my ciphering were precisely the same, showing a deficiency of six hundred dollars and the brokerage. “O, if I could but get back my stock,” thought I, “I would hold it till doomsday, before I would again sell it for a less sum than it cost me.” That was an idle thought, for the money having been borrowed, I had not the power to do as I wished. Well, I found that complaining would do no good, and it was plain that I could not recover my losses by sitting down and doing nothing; beside, it was very unlike a bold operator—a Napoleon of the exchange—to be disheartened by the first reverse or two; so I determined, as there was now a strong probability of an immediate advance of prices, to get back my Ohio stock at par. I was too late in deciding by a day, and was obliged to give one per cent. premium. That trifling difference, however, I did not regard; for what was one per cent., more or less, to a man who was sure of making ten of them? I now felt certain that I had hit the nail on the head. “_Rem tetigi acu_,” said I; and what made me more confident of success was the fact, that the newspapers, disagreeing upon almost every other subject, were agreed upon one point, namely, that, in consequence of the “better feeling” that prevailed, stocks would certainly rise. I believed them, having naturally a strong inclination to credit what I see in print.