The man who made this play in Union Pacific was a college graduate, and a veteran trader, with twenty years of hard-bought experience and a good family name behind him. While his experience, together with the advice of his broker, saved him from a heavy loss it might easily be supposed that the former alone would have prevented him from falling into the common error of novices. From which it may be observed that in stock speculation, as in other pursuits, wisdom and the ability to master one’s own impulses are sometimes late in arriving at full maturity. Indeed a broker who for upwards of thirty years has held a position of outstanding prominence on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange--a man who often handles a hundred thousand shares or more in a single day--once admitted to me that while he generally made money for clients who entrusted him with optional orders, yet he regularly lost more than half his enormous commissions trading on his own account. Which calls to mind a wise saying of the old Greek philosopher Heraclitus, five hundred years B.C.--“Many men have no wisdom regarding those things with which they come in contact; nor do they learn by experience.” The man who made the splurge in Lake Copper was a daring young Lochinvar who came out of the West, with only a moderate sum of money, but an ample store of ambition; and although enjoying a large practice in an honorable profession, he occasionally took what he called a “flyer” in the market. For some years he was kept pretty busy clearing up the results of his miscalculations in this adventure, which I imagine was his last “flyer.” I have remarked that “experience” might reasonably have been counted upon to safeguard the man in the Union Pacific deal against the error of over-acquisitiveness; and seeing it did not, it would seem that the very _in_experience of our other trader should have made him less daring. From which we may conclude that in stock trading, all speculators, whether experienced or inexperienced, are subject to those inscrutable laws of psychology which Nature herself seems to have designed for the discomfiture of those who play at the wheel of Fortune. THEY ALL RESOLVE, BUT THEY ALL GO BACK One often hears the stock trader’s sad lament,--“If I ever get even, I’ll get out and _stay_ out!” But I never knew one of this class who ever got “out even” and I never heard of one who stayed out if he did get out even. If they get out, leaving a dollar in, they go back after it; if they get out a few dollars ahead, they go back for more; in any case they all go back. They wouldn’t be content to stay out of the market any more than a little shorn lamb would be content to stand overnight uncomplainingly in a blustering March storm, outside the open gateway to a sheepfold where his brother lambs were snugly housed. [Illustration] A NEW KNIGHT-ERRANT IN SPECULATION