Deception in all its forms will be found in the armoury of the professional speculator, and the weapons, two-edged, are employed with a laboured precision of which a glimpse by the outsiders is occasionally to be obtained because it is impossible completely to conceal the fringes of the organisation by which his gains are netted. [Sidenote: THE NON-PROFESSIONAL OR HAPHAZARD SPECULATOR.] We now turn to the non-professional speculator, and what a pitiable plight is that in which these gentlemen in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred ultimately find themselves. The members of the Stock Exchange liken their place of gathering in Capel Court to a barn, and themselves to fowls inside it, who repair thither every day to pick up the golden grain thrown in by the public. This description is not exaggerated, and the more marvellous does it become as one reflects upon the subject. Many and many is the man that has toiled and earned a fortune to produce him a competence for the rest of his days, who has been lured into that fatal vortex, in very many cases because industry had become a habit with him, and he found retirement irksome. “I amuse myself with a little jobbing in the stock markets, just to have some object for going up to town twice a week,” he says to a friend in the train, with whom he chances to be travelling. Such is the beginning of more sorrow in respectable households than the world has any idea of. Many a pensive countenance furrowed by the Stock Exchange, carries in its deep lines the index to a heavy volume of lugubrious family history, which, partly from shame, is sealed but to the few who must know its contents. Prosperity brings wealth in its train, and people put by at first their gains, until a taste for the excitement of dabbling in the markets grows into a thirst, and from that into a mania, which is generally the frontier to be repassed with empty money-bags, and a sad heart, by a wiser, if not a better man. It is not so easy to be good on nothing after one has had £5,000 a year, and hence a deal of the mischief that results from the foundering of Stock Exchange speculators.