“Now, it’s all behind me, my dear boy,” he cried, as we reached the sidewalk and turned our faces up Wall Street toward Broadway.  “Fifteen hours to live my own life!  No care until ten o’clock to-morrow.  Lovely life, my dear Major, when you think of it.  Ah, old Micawber was right—­income one pound, expense one pound ten shillings; result, misery:  income one pound ten, expense one pound, outcome, happiness!  What a curse this Street is to those who abuse its power for good; half of them trying to keep out of jail and the other half fighting to keep out of the poor-house!  And most of them get so little out of it.  Just as I can detect a counterfeit bill at sight, my boy, so can I put my ringer on these money-getters when the poison of money-getting for money’s sake begins to work in their veins.  I don’t mean the laying up of money for a rainy day, or the providing for one’s family.  Every man should lay up a six-months’ doctor’s bill, just as every man should lay up money enough to keep his body out of Potter’s Field.  It’s laying up the surplus that hurts.”

Peter had his arm firmly locked in mine now.

“Now that concern of Breen & Company, where I found my error, are no better than the others.  They are new to this whirlpool, but they will soon get in over their heads.  I think it is only the third or fourth year since they started business, but they are already floating all sorts of schemes, and some of them—­if you will permit me in confidence, strictly in confidence, my dear boy —­are rather shady, I think:  at least I judge so from their deposits.”

“What are they, bankers?” I ventured.  I had never heard of the firm; not an extraordinary thing in my case when bankers were concerned.

Peter laughed: 

“Yes, bankers—­all in capital letters—­the imitation kind.  Breen came from some place out of town and made a lucky hit in his first year—­mines or something—­I forget what.  Oh, but you must know that it takes very little now-a-days to make a full-fledged banker.  All you have to do is to hoist in a safe—­through the window, generally, with the crowd looking on; rail off half the office; scatter some big ledgers over two or three newly varnished desks; move in a dozen arm-chairs, get a ticker, a black-board and a boy with a piece of chalk; be pleasant to every fellow you meet with his own or somebody else’s money in his pocket, and there you are.  But we won’t talk of these things—­it isn’t kind, and, really, I hardly know Breen, and I’m quite sure he wouldn’t know me if he saw me, and he’s a very decent gentleman in many ways, I hear.  He never overdraws his account, any way—­never tries—­and that’s more than I can say for some of his neighbors.”

The fog, which earlier in the afternoon had been but a blue haze, softening the hard outlines of the street, had now settled down in earnest, choking up the doorways, wiping out the tops of the buildings, their facades starred here and there with gas-jets, and making a smudged drawing of the columns of the Custom House opposite.