the copy of the contract to Mr. Gould, and the financier was so struck by its accuracy and by the legibility of the handwriting that afterward he almost daily “happened in” to dictate to Mr. Cary’s stenographer.  Mr. Gould’s private stenographer was in his own office in lower Broadway; but on his way down-town in the morning Mr. Gould invariably stopped at the Western Union Building, at 195 Broadway; and the habit resulted in the installation of a private office there.  He borrowed Edward to do his stenography.  The boy found himself taking not only letters from Mr. Gould’s dictation, but, what interested him particularly, the financier’s orders to buy and sell stock.

Edward watched the effects on the stock-market of these little notes which he wrote out and then shot through a pneumatic tube to Mr. Gould’s brokers.  Naturally, the results enthralled the boy, and he told Mr. Cary about his discoveries.  This, in turn, interested Mr. Cary; Mr. Gould’s dictations were frequently given in Mr. Cary’s own office, where, as his desk was not ten feet from that of his stenographer, the attorney heard them, and began to buy and sell according to the magnate’s decisions.

Edward had now become tremendously interested in the stock game which he saw constantly played by the great financier; and having a little money saved up, he concluded that he would follow in the wake of Mr. Gould’s orders.  One day, he naively mentioned his desire to Mr. Gould, when the financier seemed in a particularly favorable frame of mind; but Edward did not succeed in drawing out the advice he hoped for.  “At least,” reasoned Edward, “he knew of my intention; and if he considered it a violation of confidence he would have said as much.”

Construing the financier’s silence to mean at least not a prohibition, Edward went to his Sunday-school teacher, who was a member of a Wall Street brokerage firm, laid the facts before him, and asked him if he would buy for him some Western Union stock.  Edward explained, however, that somehow he did not like the gambling idea of buying “on margin,” and preferred to purchase the stock outright.  He was shown that this would mean smaller profits; but the boy had in mind the loss of his father’s fortune, brought about largely by “stock margins,” and he did not intend to follow that example.  So, prudently, under the brokerage of his Sunday-school teacher, and guided by the tips of no less a man than the controlling factor of stock-market finance, Edward Bok took his first plunge in Wall Street!

Of course the boy’s buying and selling tallied precisely with the rise and fall of Western Union stock.  It could scarcely have been otherwise.  Jay Gould had the cards all in his hands; and as he bought and sold, so Edward bought and sold.  The trouble was, the combination did not end there, as Edward might have foreseen had he been older and thus wiser.  For as Edward bought and sold, so did his Sunday-school teacher, and all his customers who had seen the wonderful acumen of their broker in choosing exactly the right time to buy and sell Western Union.  But Edward did not know this.