an intimate connection between hats and polls.  A story has gone through the papers, to be sure, about an unfortunate deacon who found it impossible to collect the coppers of the congregation in a Greeley hat, but then slight excuses have been made available on charitable occasions before the present election, and we decline to accept the sentiment of that congregation as unmixed devotion to the Republican candidates.  They did not wish to Grant their money, that was all.

And then, again, unlike the miller of the old conundrum, men generally wear white hats to keep their heads cool; with which laudable endeavor why should the Stock Exchange wish to interfere?  One never hears of a “corner” in hats.  And then, too, was it the bulls or the bears who objected to them?  Bulls, we all know, have an aversion to scarlet drapery, but Darwin, in his studies of the feeling for color among animals, has omitted any references to a horror of white hats even among the most accomplished of the anthropoid apes.

Pondering all these problems, and many more, our puzzled trio went to the Stock Exchange on the last day of September.  We were conducted into the safe seclusion of the Visitors’ Gallery, from which coign of vantage we could look down unharmed upon the frantic multitude below.  The room is large and very lofty, its prevailing tint a warm brown, relieved by bright decorations of the Byzantine order.  Across one end runs a small gallery for visitors, without seats, and some twenty feet above the floor, and opposite the gallery is a raised platform, with a long table and majestic arm-chairs for the president and other officers of the Board.  High on the wall above these elevated dignitaries glitters in large gold letters the mystic legend, “New York Stock Exchange.”  On the left of the platform stands a large blackboard, whereon the fluctuations in stocks are recorded, and around the sides of the room are displayed various signs bearing the names of different stocks (like the banners of the knights in royal chapels), beneath which eager groups collect.  At the lower end of the room, under the Visitors’ Gallery, are seats whereon weary brokers may repose after the brunt of battle.  In the centre of the upper end of the vast apartment is a long oval cock-pit—­if it may be so called—­of two or three degrees, with a table in the lowest circle.  It is so arranged as to give the brokers, standing upon the graded steps, full opportunity to see and to be seen.  On the table, in singular contrast with the spirit of the place, was a large and beautiful basket of flowers.  Anything more painfully incongruous it would be difficult to imagine.  The poor flowers seemed to wear an air of patient suffering as they wasted their sweetness on that (literally) howling wilderness.