It was not noon yet, and we walked up slowly to kill time and breathe the salt air. Harding Brothers had a branch office on the Boardwalk and we used to drop in every morning and see how they’d opened. It was more force of habit than anything else, for I wasn’t doing anything. The market, we found, was strong and active. My friend, who was quite bullish, was carrying a moderate line purchased several points lower. He began to tell me what an obviously wise thing it was to hold stocks for much higher prices. I wasn’t paying enough attention to him to take the trouble to agree with him. I was looking over the quotation board, noting the changes--they were mostly advances--until I came to Union Pacific. I got a feeling that I ought to sell it. I can’t tell you more. I just felt like selling it. I asked myself why I should feel like that, and I couldn’t find any reason whatever for going short of UP. I stared at the last price on the board until I couldn’t see any figures or any board or anything else, for that matter. All I knew was that I wanted to sell Union Pacific and I couldn’t find out why I wanted to. I must have looked queer, for my friend, who was standing alongside of me, suddenly nudged me and asked, “Hey, what’s the matter?” “I don’t know,” I answered. “Going to sleep?” he said. “No,” I said. “I am not going to sleep. What I am going to do is to sell that stock.” I had always made money following my hunches. I walked over to a table where there were some blank order pads. My friend followed me. I wrote out an order to sell a thousand Union Pacific at the market and handed it to the manager. He was smiling when I wrote it and when he took it. But when he read the order he stopped smiling and looked at me. “Is this right?” he asked me. But I just looked at him and he rushed it over to the operator. “What are you doing?” asked my friend. “I’m selling it!” I told him. “Selling what?” he yelled at me. If he was a bull how could I be a bear? Something was wrong. “A thousand UP.,” I said. “Why?” he asked me in great excitement. I shook my head, meaning I had no reason. But he must have thought I’d got a tip, because he took me by the arm and led me outside into the hall, where we could be out of sight and hearing of the other customers and rubbering chairwarmers. “What did you hear?” he asked me. He was quite excited. UP. was one of his pets and he was bullish on it because of its earnings and its prospects. But he was willing to take a bear tip on it at second hand. “Nothing!” I said. “You didn’t?” He was skeptical and showed it plainly. “I didn’t hear a thing.” “Then why in blazes are you selling?” “I don’t know,” I told him. I spoke gospel truth. “Oh, come across, Larry,” he said. He knew it was my habit to know why I traded. I had sold a thousand shares of Union Pacific. I must have a very good reason to sell that much stock in the face of the strong market.