It was just after ten, and the doors had been open but a few moments when we entered the gallery, already quite full of ladies and gentlemen—­generally very young gentlemen, anxious to learn from the glorious example of their elders.  The floor below us was fast being strewn with torn bits of paper, which have to be swept up several times a day.  Eager groups were gathered under the various signs upon the walls and pillars, apparently playing the Italian game of morra, to judge by the quick gestures of their restless fingers.  Some were scribbling cabalistic signs on little bits of paper, and almost all were howling like maniacs or wild beasts half starved.  The only place I was ever in at all to be compared with it in volume and variety of noise is the parrot-room in the London Zoological Gardens.  Bedlam and Pandemonium I have not visited—­as yet—­and consequently cannot speak from personal experience.  But the parrots in that awful house in Regent’s Park are capable of making more hideous noises in a given moment than any other wild beasts in the world, except brokers.  Here the human animal comes out triumphantly supreme.

To add to the refreshing variety of the din, long, lanky youths in gray sauntered about like the keepers of the carnivora, and bawled incessantly till they were red in the face.  These, we were told, were the pages, who reported the state of the market and delivered orders and commissions.  To the uninitiated they were a fraud and a delusion, but so was the whole thing.  A crowd of men, walking about or standing in groups, note-book in hand, talking eagerly or yelling unintelligible nonsense at the top of their voices, and gesticulating with the fury of madmen, while in and around the crowd strolled those extraordinary pages, calmly shouting full in the brokers’ faces,—­this, we were told, was “business!” This is the mysterious occupation to which our friends, countrymen and lovers devote so large a portion of their time and thoughts.  At this strange diversion millions of dollars change hands in a few hours, and bulls and bears in this little nest agree to make things generally uncomfortable and uncertain for the outside world.

But where were the white hats, and what of their daring wearers?  As the crowd thickened, they began to shine out upon the general blackness in obvious distinction.  At first, the howling multitude, eager for filthy lucre, took no particular notice of them beyond an occasional hurried poke or pat, but this delusive mildness did not long continue.  After the first fifteen or twenty minutes, during which the favorite stocks had been danced up and down a few times, like so many crying babies, the appetite of the hundred-headed hydra abated a little, and the general attention to business relaxed.  Suddenly—­no one knew whence or wherefore—­up rose a white hat in the air, high above the heads of the people, and a bareheaded individual was seen struggling wildly in the arms of the mob, who set up ironical cheers at his unavailing efforts to regain his flying headpiece.  It rose and fell faster and farther than any fancy stock of them all, now soaring to the vaulted roof, now being kicked along the dusty floor.