"I have written you more at length than I intended, but I could not do otherwise in return for your amusing, friendly, and satisfactory epistle. We shall meet again, as in days of yore, and then we will gather up all these scribblings, and enjoy these scenes again. In the mean time, believe that I wish you success in your present suit, for the sake of three of us,--but more particularly and selfishly that of "V. CHEVILLERE." CHAPTER XVIII. V. CHEVILLERE TO B. RANDOLPH. "New-York, 18--. "DEAR CHUM, "Events which seem to me worth recording, crowd upon us so fast now, that it is almost impossible to give you, according to promise, even a profile view of our movements. "This morning, about the same hour at which we went to church yesterday, we strolled down Wall-street (and we seemed the only strollers there) to see the Shylocks in their dens, if any such could be found. I was instantly struck with the concentrated looks, and absorbed countenances of all the persons we met. Most of them were running in and out of the banks, with their little bank books in their hands, making mental calculations of notes to be taken up, deposites where made, and how much. Brokers were standing behind their counters, ready to commence their brisk, and (in this country) almost unhazardous game. Many of them amass immense fortunes; it is not at all uncommon for one of these houses to loan to a state several millions at once. "We went upon 'change at the hour of twelve. There, in the large room of the rotunda, or circular part of the exchange, merchants, and brokers, and bankers, and moneyed men meet, pretty much after the same fashion as our jockeys and racers upon the turf. The light falls from the dome upon these faces, and reveals the best study for a picture I have ever seen. The seller and the sellee, the shaver and the shavee, or diamond cut diamond, as Damon expresses it:--bear with me but a moment while I go over these dull details, and in return I will tell you something more of the lady with the black mantle. "The most predominant expression that I saw upon 'change was _affectation_; the affectation of business; not the silly school-boy affectation which wears off with the improving mind, but that which is first put on by business men, to disguise the real operations of the mind, and which afterward grows into a confirmed habit, and is seen deeply set in wrinkles, long after the first exciting cause has disappeared.