The year 1888 from start to finish was one whirl of excitement in my business life. The mental effort of handling the enormous business--it must be remembered ours was a one-man concern--was most exhausting. I became weary of making money and longed for a dull period that I might rest. But there was no dull period that year. In January we received from our London friends confidential information of the arrangement with the syndicate. Its enormous holdings were, so far as possible, to be unloaded on American buyers. This was for us to accomplish. The spot stock had to be sold against for future delivery and held until maturity of the sales. Of course, the sales were made at a discount from the spot price, and as time went on this increased. When the buyers at one level were filled up, the price was lowered until a new level, that would tempt further buyers, was reached, and so it went on. The trade conceived the idea that our London friends and ourselves were selling the market short. They never dreamed that we were unloading for the syndicate, which was daily bidding £167 for spot, while we were selling futures far below that figure. They did not know that at four o'clock London time, when the official market closed on the thirtieth day of April, the syndicate would cease buying and that a collapse would then be inevitable. It was not our business to enlighten them, and strange to relate, not one man asked us our opinion of the market. They bought of us day after day and apparently believed that when the time for delivery came we would be unable to make it and would have to settle with them at their own figure. A great many of our sales were made on the Exchange. On this business we could and did call margins, but there were some weak people whom we could not avoid selling and in such a market there were sure to be failures among that class. As previously explained we guaranteed all sales, and whenever a customer defaulted we at once sold double the quantity we had sold him, to some strong concern. This made us short of the market, and while we made some loss on the initial transaction, our profit on the second sale always more than extinguished it. The first man who defaulted brought to our office a deed for a farm in Pennsylvania and offered it to us for the four thousand dollars he owed. I handed it back to him, told him to give it to his wife, and forgave him the debt. The next man was a bigger fish. He owed us nineteen thousand eight hundred dollars. We made up the account, and when I handed him the statement I told him we would not press him and if he was ever able to pay us twenty-five cents on the dollar we would give him a receipt in full. In later years he was worth a good deal of money, though I believe he has since lost it, but he never paid us a dollar.