Not far from this vast Chamber, where great financial operations are conducted on the highest principles of honor, and with the strictest regard to the Marquis of Dusenbury’s rules, there is another less pretentious Chamber, known as “open,” a sort of overflow meeting.  Those who have not quite left hope behind can go in here.  Here are the tickers communicating with the Chamber, tended by lads, who transfer the figures to big blackboards on the wall.  In front of these boards sit, from morning to night, rows, perhaps relays, of men intently or listlessly watching the figures.  Many of them, who seldom make a sign, come here from habit; they have nowhere else to go.  Some of them were once lords in the great Chamber, who have been, as the phrase is, “cleaned out.”  There is a gray-bearded veteran in seedy clothes, with sunken fiery eyes, who was once many times a millionaire, was a power in the Board, followed by reporters, had a palace in the Avenue, and drove to his office with coachman and footman in livery, and his wife headed the list of charities.  Now he spends his old age watching this blackboard, and considers it a good day that brings him five dollars and his car-fare.  At one end of the low-ceiled apartment are busy clerks behind a counter, alert and cheerful.  If one should go through a side door and down a passage he might encounter the smell of rum.  Smart young men, clad in the choicest raiment from the misfit counters, with greed stamped on their astute faces, bustle about, watch the blackboards, and make investments with each other.  Middle-aged men in slouch hats lounge around with hungry eyes.  The place is feverish rather than exciting.  A tall fellow, whose gait and clothes proclaim him English, with a hard face and lack-lustre eyes, saunters about; his friends at home suppose he is making his fortune in America.  A dapper young gentleman, quite in the mode, and with the quick air of prosperity, rapidly enters the room and confers with a clerk at the counter.  He has the run of the Chamber, and is from the great house of Flamm and Slamm.  Perhaps he is taking a “flier” on his own account, perhaps he represents his house in a side transactionthere are so many ways open to enterprising young men in the city; at any rate, his entrance is regarded as significant:  This is not a hospital for the broken down and “cleaned out” of the Chamber, but it is a place of business, which is created and fed by the incessant “ticker.”  How men existed or did any business at all before the advent of the “ticker” is a wonder.

But the Chamber, the creator of low-pressure and high-pressure, the inspirer of the “ticker,” is the great generator of business.  Here I found Henderson in the morning hour, and he came up to me on the call of a messenger.  He approached, nonchalant and smiling as usual.  “Do you see that man,” he said, as we stood a moment looking down, “sitting there on a side bench—­big body, small head, hair grayish, long beard parted—­apparently taking no interest in anything?