“‘S-sh-sh!’ whispers the clerk, scart. ’’Tis the boss.  The bloke what runs the hotel.  He’s a fine man, but he has troubles.  He’s blue.’

“‘So that’s the boss, hey?’ says I.  ’And he’s blue.  Well, he looks it.  What’s troublin’ him?  Ain’t business good?’

“‘Never better.  It ain’t that.  He has things on his mind.  You see—­’

“I cal’late he’d have told us the yarn, only Sim wouldn’t wait to hear it.  We was goin’ sight-seein’ and we had ‘aquarium’ and ‘Stock Exchange’ on the list for that afternoon.  The hotel clerk had made out a kind of schedule for us of things we’d ought to see while we was in New York, and so fur we’d took in the zoological menagerie and the picture museum, and Central Park and Brooklyn Bridge.

“On the way downtown in the elevated railroad Sim done some preachin’.  His text was took from the Golconda House sign, which had ’T.  Dempsey, Proprietor,’ painted on it.

“‘It’s that Dempsey man’s conscience that makes him so blue, Hiram,’ says Sim.  ‘It’s the way he makes his money.  He sells liquor.’

“‘Oh!’ says I.  ‘Is that it?  I thought maybe he’d been sleepin’ on one of his own hotel beds.  They’re enough to make any man blue—­black and blue.’

“The ‘aquarium’ wa’n’t a success.  Phinney was disgusted.  He give one look around, grabbed me by the arm, and marched me out of that building same as Deacon Titcomb, of the Holiness Church at Denboro, marched his boy out of the Universalist sociable.

“‘It’s nothin’ but a whole passel of fish,’ he snorts.  ’The idea of sendin’ two Cape Codders a couple of miles to look at fish.  I’ve looked at ’em and fished for ’em, and et ’em all the days of my life,’ he says, ’and when I’m on a vacation I want a change.  I’d forgot that “aquarium” meant fish, or you wouldn’t have got me within smellin’ distance of it.  Necessity’s one thing and pleasure’s another, as the boy said about takin’ his ma’s spring bitters.’

“So we headed for the Stock Exchange.  We got our gallery tickets at the bank where the Golconda folks kept money, and in a little while we was leanin’ over a kind of marble bulwarks and starin’ down at a gang of men smokin’ and foolin’ and carryin’ on.  ’Twas a dull day, so we found out afterward, and I guess likely that was true.  Anyway, I never see such grown-up men act so much like children.  There was a lot of poles stuck up around with signs on ’em, and around every pole was a circle of bedlamites hollerin’ like loons.  Hollerin’ was the nighest to work of anything I see them fellers do, unless ‘twas tearin’ up papers and shovin’ the pieces down somebody’s neck or throwin’ ’em in the air like a play-actin’ snowstorm.

“’What’s the matter with ’em?’ says I.  ’High finance taken away their brains?’

“But Phinney was awful interested.  He dumped some money in a mine once.  The mine caved in on it, I guess, for not a red cent ever come to the top again, but he’s been a kind of prophet concernin’ finances ever sence.