"Go outside and up the stairs into the galleries and you can see it all you want to, but not here."
Uncle did as he was bid, but found that he was quite widely separated from his family, because he had been sent up the opposite stairway from them.
"I came up to see the Board of Trade," he said, confidently, to a well-dressed stranger next to him.
"Well, there it is in all its glory," said the stranger.
"Oh, I see! The board is that table where them fellers is a tickin' them machines. You see I thought they would be a setting and a trading across a long, wide board like they used to do at the country stores for counters. But them fellers down there acts like a lot of lunatics. I don't see how they can ever come to a bargain, yelling and spewing around that way. And then I don't see the bulls and bears that change the market."
The stranger thought it a useless job to try to enlighten him.
When Uncle and his family came down, he went up to the doorkeeper and asked, "Say, do you belong here?" The keeper nodded. "Did you know Bill Simmons what lost five thousand dollars here last year?" The door keeper shook his head. "Well, say, I just want to ask one more question. Are them people down there the bulls and bears themselves, and are they the Board of Trade and are they the people that the farmers are so afraid of?" The keeper nodded.
"Well," continued Uncle, "I've got this to say; any set of farmers as is fools enough to be afraid of them yelling idiots, aint got no backbone at all."
Chicago was unsettling many of Uncle's ideas, and he began to decide that the only real, bonafide thing he could swear by was his own farm, and that the great outside world was only a great circus of art and extravagant genius.