That rose a peg, or e’en stood still;
Dod rot it!—it was sure to fall.
Secondly, a paragraph appeared in the Herald, saying something about England and war; and this circumstance, combined with the fact of my being a holder, was too much for Ohio sixes, and down they went. Nothing short of a miracle could have sustained them under such a pressure. But this was not all; for, in the incipient stage of the panic which followed, the wind suddenly veered round to north-east, and a storm came on to increase the difficulty. Such a scene as ensued has rarely been witnessed since Wall street became a theatre for speculation. Faces became elongated many hundred feet in the aggregate; eyes opened to their widest capacity, and seemed to be looking wildly about for that greatest of bug-bears, the British; and every speculator’s heart, like Macbeth’s, did
————“Knock at the ribs,
Against the use of nature,”
as though some terrible calamity, involving the annihilation of every thing in the shape of stocks and money, were impending.
If some giant from another globe had come upon the earth, and suddenly knocked the foundation stones from under that noble structure, the merchants’ exchange, the crash would hardly have been greater or more alarming than that which took place, on the day in question, among the stocks. I stood silently by, and saw my property vanish, as it were, before my eyes; but I will not attempt to describe my feelings, for I am sure that I should not be able to convey an idea of them to the reader’s mind. Suffice it to say that I was hurt—cut to the very soul. “Farewell, Niagara, Quebec, and Montreal,” thought I; “if I can keep out of the almshouse, the way things are going, I shall be remarkably lucky.”
After consulting with my friend, the broker, who, to do him justice, it must be confessed, gave me the best advice that his fears permitted, I concluded to sell out my stock at ninety-eight, while it was on the descent, and buy again the moment it should reach the lowest point, which the broker and I thought would be about ninety. Then, if our expectations should be realized, and the stock again reach what I had before given, namely, one hundred and four, it is clear that I should, beside recovering my loss, make eight per cent. profit.
Here was a most glorious opportunity for a speculation—one of those that occur about twice in a century. It was a happy thought in me to sell even at a great loss, with a view of repurchasing on better terms; and I could not help regarding it as a singularly bold move—one indicating great genius, and just such a one as Napoleon himself, under similar circumstances, might have conceived and made. I became elated at the prospect, and bade my friend sell out with all possible expedition. He did so at ninety-eight, being a loss to me of six per cent., or six hundred dollars—a pretty fair clip from the back of my little capital of fifteen hundred.
I should have been exceedingly annoyed by this docking of my fortune, had not the certainty which I felt of making good the deficiency, encouraged me; and but for the most perfect confidence I entertained in the success of my next adventure, I should, in all human probability, have retired from Wall street with much the same feeling that a fox has when he sneaks off to his hole, after parting with his tail in a trap.