“Waters told us that when he was translated he was long a big block of U. S. Steel and short a lot of Reading, and some hyenas were trying to shake him out of the Steel and run him in on the Reading. He pulled over and studied with feverish avidity a basket full of paper tape, from what he called a ticker in the corner, and declared that if he had lived another two days he would have had all their hides on his back yard fence. You may know what some of these expressions mean. To us they seemed technical and confusing, but we gathered that death had deprived Waters of a ship load of pieces-of-eight and we felt very sorry for him. “After that he took us around to dozens of offices at night. We saw the daylight haunts of swivel chair buccaneers, whose quarter decks were mahogany desks, and who preyed upon the vitals of the country of their birth, and the nests of merciless super-piratical combinations that mulcted mankind by impounding the necessities of life. We went to a building on lower Broadway where Waters said there were huge vaults full of the products of the most highly refined rascality in existence. He took us to the vaults of several food trusts, corporation attorneys, and banks, and showed us various documents and other evidence of wholesale plunder and remorseless nation-wide robbery that would have taken our breaths away if we had had any. It was a sort of a travelogue--a sight seeing tour in a region of unbelievable iniquity. We were indeed in shark infested waters. “It occurs to you no doubt that the word buccaneers and other sea terms that I am using, pertain, properly speaking, to nautical financeering only, but it is not out of place to apply them to similar professional activities on land, for it really makes little difference to a genuine pirate, or to those he despoils, whether he stands on a wooden deck or on an oriental office rug. “After these nocturnal rounds among the robbers’ roosts it was our custom to assemble in the belfry, where Waters would deliver thrilling talks on the methods of the ‘Wizards of Finance’ and the ‘Kings of the Street’, as he called them. These meetings were necessarily open, and many stranger shades often hovered about and listened. Hosts of evil spirits moved in the surrounding gloom and mocked with sepulchral and mephitic laughter when Walters dilated upon famous financial atrocities in which some of them had been participants. “We naturally had a professional interest in Waters’ tales of present day freebooting, and for several nights he held us spell bound.” At this point I asked my shadowy friend on the stairway if he didn’t think it rather incongruous, or at least in bad taste, for the shades of such a malodorous bevy of professional villains as he had with him, to hold spiritual convocations in a church belfry.