When you buy a house even if both parties sign, the agreement is worthless unless you put up one American dollar and get the other fellow’s receipt for it in writing. If you buy a horse or a cow, or anything else of value, the same precaution is necessary. So too if you sign a will. Your own word is not good enough. You must get two others to sign with you before the Surrogate is satisfied. None of this in the Stock Exchange. A wink, or two fingers held up, is enough. Often in the thick of the fight when the floor of the Exchange is a howling mob, when frenzied brokers shout themselves hoarse and stocks are going up and down by leaps and bounds, and ruin or fortune is measured by minutes, the lifting of a man’s hand over the heads of the crowd is all that binds the bargain. What may have happened in the half hour’s interim, before the buyer and seller can compare and confirm, makes no difference in the bargain. It may be ruin--possibly is--to one or the other, but there is no crawling--no equivocation--no saying you didn’t understand, or “I was waving to the man behind you.” Just this plain, straight, unvarnished truth, “Yes, that’s right--send it in.” If it be ruin, the loser empties out on the table everything he has in his pockets; everything he has in his bank; all his houses, lots, and securities--often his wife’s jewels, and pays 30, 40, or 70 per cent., as the case may be. What he has saved from the wreck are his integrity and his good name. In this salvage lies the respect with which his fellows hold him. Every hand is now held out. He has stood the test, he has made good. Let him have swerved by a hair’s breadth and his career in the Street would have been ended.[98] Of course mistakes and misunderstandings do sometimes occur, and these are the banes of the broker’s life. He will lose $500 with equanimity on a personal venture, but he will howl in distress over a loss of $25 on a mistake, and apply to himself a lurid mosaic of epithets because of it. The one merely shows bad judgment and is one of the little amenities; the other he feels is stupidity. At such times the stockbroker adopts Talleyrand’s bold hyperbole when he heard of the death of the Duc d’Enghien, “It is worse than a crime; it is a blunder.”