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Updated: June 29, 2025
He had plunged with their savings and had drawn a blank. He had lost his position in disgrace and had landed in the bucket-shop, the sub-cellar pit of the big Stock Exchange hell. From there a week before he had been sent to prison for theft, and that morning she had been turned into the street by her landlord.
The offices of Smathe and Smathe corresponded with alarming closeness to Mr. Prohack's idea of what a bucket-shop might be. Mr. Prohack had the gravest fears for his hundred thousand pounds. "This is the solicitor's office new style," said Bishop, who seemed to have an uncanny gift of reading thoughts. "Very big firm. Anglo-American. Smathe and Smathe are two cousins. Percy's American.
"The 'sentiment," said the market reports, "was bearish"; and the traders, speculators, eighth-chasers, scalpers, brokers, bucket-shop men, and the like all the world of La Salle Street had become so accustomed to these "Bear conditions," that it was hard to believe that they would not continue indefinitely. Jadwin, inevitably, had been again drawn into the troubled waters of the Pit.
And don't forget to convey the idea of the whole business being plutocratic. You know the sort of thing: Park Lane Israelites, scooping millions, at the expense of the overtaxed proletariat in England. Jingoism, a sort of swell bucket-shop business you know the tone. None of your heroics, mind you. It's got to be news; but you can work in the ridicule all right."
As I thus proposed that I be in a jiffy caught up from the extremely humble level of reputed bucket-shop dealer into the highest heaven of high finance, that I be made the official spokesman of the financial gods, his expression was so ludicrous that I almost lost my gravity. I suspect, for a moment he thought I had gone mad.
"My father was a clergyman, his family was good. He and I lived almost alone. He had an income and his stipend, but he was ambitious for me, and, by some means or other, while I was away he was led to invest all his money with one of these wretched bucket-shop companies. A telegram fetched me home unexpectedly just as I was entering for my degree.
To the dramatist the fraudulent is the only interesting financier. He certainly is very fond of working on the Mercadet basis. He commonly confounds the stockbroker with the bucket-shop keeper, and invariably assumes that the company promoter is a thief.
But "bucket-shop" I never kept. As the kings of finance were the representatives of the great merchants, manufacturers and investors, so was I the representative of the masses, of those who wished their small savings properly invested.
"Your digestion is bad or else you made a recent winning in your favorite bucket-shop. Now listen to me: Whatever Johnny Gamble's doing at the present time is of no consequence. Let him go through with the deal he has on and think he has scared you off. I'll only ask you to make one more attempt against him.
Later, he had outlined to her what his life had been, telling her of his struggles when a penniless student of the City law school, of his early and unsavory criminal-court efforts, and his unhappy plunge into the morasses of Eighth-ward politics, of his campaign against the "Dave Kelly" gang, and the death of his political career which came with that opposition, of his swinging round to the tides of the times and taking up with bucket-shop work, of his "shark" lawyer practices and his police-court legal trickeries, of his gradual identification with the poolroom interests and his first gleaning of gambling-house lore, of his drifting deeper and deeper into this life of unearned increment, of his fight with the Bar Association, which was taken and lost before the Judiciary Committee of Congress, and of his final offer of retainer from Penfield, and private and expert services after the second raid on that gambler's Saratoga house.
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