On one of the last days in September we were the astonished recipients of a singular and mysterious invitation from a member of the New York Board of Brokers. The note contained words like these: "Come to the Exchange on Monday, September 30th: white hats are declared confiscated on that day." It would have puzzled Oedipus or a Philadelphia lawyer to trace the connection between white hats and stocks, to tell what Hecuba was to them or they to Hecuba, and why they should be more interfered with by the New York Stock Exchange on the 30th of September than upon any other day. It is true that during the last summer some slight political bias was supposed to be hidden beneath that popular headpiece irreverently styled "a Greeley plug," but then stocks are not politics, nor would any but a punster trace an intimate connection between hats and polls. A story has gone through the papers, to be sure, about an unfortunate deacon who found it impossible to collect the coppers of the congregation in a Greeley hat, but then slight excuses have been made available on charitable occasions before the present election, and we decline to accept the sentiment of that congregation as unmixed devotion to the Republican candidates. They did not wish to Grant their money, that was all. And then, again, unlike the miller of the old conundrum, men generally wear _white_ hats to keep their heads cool; with which laudable endeavor why should the Stock Exchange wish to interfere? One never hears of a "corner" in hats. And then, too, was it the bulls or the bears who objected to them? Bulls, we all know, have an aversion to scarlet drapery, but Darwin, in his studies of the feeling for color among animals, has omitted any references to a horror of white hats even among the most accomplished of the anthropoid apes.