Peculiarly enough--or shall I say, naturally--after tossing off the trust company's millions, of which half were mine, in a vain endeavor to support the market for its stocks, I was as full of spirit as the month of May. I had been broke before, and the sensation was not new to me. Withal, I had profited. A new fund of experience was mine. Even though I had not gathered shekels as a result of my hard work in Goldfield, I had learned something--I had acquired the rudiments of a great business. Goldfield had been the mining emporium--the security factory. New York was the recognized market center. Market handling had been my weak spot. I now had a chance to witness the performance of some past-masters in the art of market manipulation, and I tried to make the best of the opportunity. I watched intently the daily sessions of the New York Curb. I was in and out of brokerage offices hourly. Nothing that transpired escaped me. Within a month I heard enough and saw enough to convince me that, daring as were the operations of the mergerers and waterers of Goldfield Consolidated, in that they ballooned the price of their security at its inception some $29,000,000 (400 per cent.) above the accepted intrinsic worth and were able to get the public in at top prices, their activities were but amateurish when compared with the stock-market campaign in Nipissing, which was now transpiring on the New York Curb. In the Nipissing campaign tens of millions of the public's money went glimmering, several great promoters' fortunes were reared as by magic, some big names and big reputations were tarnished, and dollars in $1,000,000 blocks were juggled like glass balls under the touch of sleight-of-hand performers. AN ORGY IN MARKET MANIPULATION This market melodrama was well staged. It had a sensational start-off, and action was at high tension every minute. The performance had covered a period of seven months when I arrived in New York, and was reaching its climax. It was a wild orgy in market-manipulation and money-fleecing that had no parallel in history from the early Comstock days up to and including Greenwater. As a mining-stock boom it was a dizzy, bewildering success--full of red fire and explosions to the last curtain climax. W. B. Thompson, Montana mine promoter and money-getter; Captain Joseph R. Delamar, famed as a daring adventurer on land and sea, and recently a highly successful financier, mine-owner, stock-market operator and art collector; John Hays Hammond, mining engineer, promoter, politician and ambitious society leader; A. Chester Beatty, millionaire mining engineer, and the seven Guggenheim brothers, were in the all-star cast. Mr. Thompson, by reason of the fact that he was market manager, was most under the spotlight, although at times he was obscured by the others.