at last such a countless throng, as to defy all stock-exchange ingenuity in exhibiting severally their conditions, their prospects, and their dividends; and it was just at the height of this emergency, and when the difficulty had become intolerable, that a great genius arose upon the troubled scene for the relief of the choked market.
This was no other than Bullings, the great stockbroking promoter, who originated the fertile modern idea of Consolidation, in gathering up the countless separately existing subs into comparatively few great consolidated interests; and who first successfully applied, as though by magic, his amalgamating hand to a thousand adjacent but distinct and separate subs in Atalanta. The huge additional capital of the new concern, which was still, by economy of consolidated management, to pay on the consolidated total much more dividend than before, and the adroitness with which he dealt with—aye, and pacified—almost countless superseded directors, who, with embarrassing but irresistible compliment to Bullings himself, persisted in valuing their seats, not by the small realities of the past, but by those grand prospects of the future which their own timely sacrifice of resignation rendered attainable, raised Bullings' reputation to unprecedented height, and surrounded him with quite a legion of eager speculators, who hung upon every glance and sign and word of the great man. I, too, and Brown as well, tried at times to get a wrinkle out of Bullings, so as to guide us to a premium or two. But the fellow, unless he scented the large order, had ever a dodging way of looking through you, instead of at you, and of seeming to be always so distressingly
