flung out an arm crying:

"'Sell twenty-five May at ninety-five and an eighth," while Kelly
and Semple had almost simultaneously shouted, "'Give seven-eighths
for May!"

The official reporter had been leaning far over to catch the first
quotations, one eye upon the clock at the end of the room. The hour
and minute hands were at right angles.

Then suddenly, cutting squarely athwart the vague crescendo of the
floor came the single incisive stroke of a great gong. Instantly a
tumult was unchained. Arms were flung upward in strenuous gestures,
and from above the crowding heads in the Wheat Pit a multitude of
hands, eager, the fingers extended, leaped into the air. All
articulate expression was lost in the single explosion of sound as
the traders surged downwards to the centre of the Pit, grabbing each
other, struggling towards each other, tramping, stamping, charging
through with might and main. Promptly the hand on the great dial
above the clock stirred and trembled, and as though driven by the
tempest breath of the Pit moved upward through the degrees of its
circle. It paused, wavered, stopped at length, and on the instant
the hundreds of telegraph keys scattered throughout the building
began clicking off the news to the whole country, from the Atlantic
to the Pacific and from Mackinac to Mexico, that the Chicago market
had made a slight advance and that May wheat, which had closed the
day before at ninety-three and three-eighths, had opened that
morning at ninety-four and a half.

But the advance brought out no profit-taking sales. The redoubtable