ber thirty-first, the few square feet assigned to them without encroaching upon their neighbors. Anybody familiar with the Exchange could play blind-man's-buff in the middle of this anthill and with no difficulty lay his hands upon any particular man whom he might need.
The subject of the conversations, the business under discussion, varied step by step. Proprietors of ships discussed the clauses of a charter-party with their charterers. Bonders jabbered of schedules and warrants. The air was full of barbarous and exotic phrases; hundred-weights, primage, loans on bottomry. There was talk of special felonies provided against by particular laws. A shipowner was complaining of the barratry committed by his captains. Elsewhere someone was reckoning the total tax on navigation. A shipper was consulting with his supercargo. Nautical assessors were drawing up statements of damages.
His hat in his hand, the dean of a Nation was offering his services to an importer of live beef from Argentina, and to another man who had received a cargo of preserved meat from the same country. A customofficer was taxing the baes of one of the Nations with fraud and irregularity, and they, in turn, were blaming it upon the bonded merchant.
All around the ground floor, beneath the galleries, there were lines of high desks from which the calculators, figures turned men, climbed down only to climb up again, as if struck with vertigo, making themselves hoarse bawling out quotations that the reporters from financial newspapers were hastily taking down in their notebooks.
So many manœuvres to arrive at a single result; money! One man had a taciturn, almost funereal air,
