At lunch time Harbinger asked me to go out with him. On our way we overtook the treasurer and auditor, who joined us without words. We were a strange party of four,--tall discontent, bald gloom, lonely obesity and middling innocence. Two and two we walked down Broadway to the top of Wall Street, turned into it and almost immediately turned out of it again into New Street, a narrow little thoroughfare which serves the Stock Exchange as a back alley. The air was distressed with that frightful, destructive b-oo-o-o-o-ing which attends falling prices. It seemed to issue not only from the windows and doors of the great red building but from all its crevices and through the pores of the bricks. “They are whaling us in there to-day,” said Harbinger over his shoulder. “Nine,” said John Harrier. It was the first word I had heard him utter, and it surprised me that the sound was definite and positive. “Are you talking about Great Midwestern Railroad stock?” I asked. “Yes,” said Harbinger, “John says it sold at nine this morning. That is the lowest price in all the company’s history. Every few days there’s a rumor on the Stock Exchange that we are busted, as so many other railroads are, and then the speculators, as I told you, create so much uproar and confusion that no legitimate buyer can find a legitimate seller, but all must do business with the speculator, who plays upon their emotions in the primitive manner by means of terrifying sounds and horrible grimaces. Hear him! He has also a strange power of simulation. He adds to the fears of the seller when the seller is already fearful, and to the anxieties of the buyer when the buyer is already impatient, making one to part with his stock for less than it’s worth and the other to pay for it more than he should.”