force within the Board of Trade Building that held the tide of the
streets within its grip, alternately drawing it in and throwing it
forth. Within there, a great whirlpool, a pit of roaring waters spun
and thundered, sucking in the life tides of the city, sucking them
in as into the mouth of some tremendous cloaca, the maw of some
colossal sewer; then vomiting them forth again, spewing them up and
out, only to catch them in the return eddy and suck them in afresh.

Thus it went, day after day. Endlessly, ceaselessly the Pit,
enormous, thundering, sucked in and spewed out, sending the swirl of
its mighty central eddy far out through the city's channels.
Terrible at the centre, it was, at the circumference, gentle,
insidious and persuasive, the send of the flowing so mild, that to
embark upon it, yielding to the influence, was a pleasure that
seemed all devoid of risk. But the circumference was not bounded by
the city. All through the Northwest, all through the central world
of the Wheat the set and whirl of that innermost Pit made itself
felt; and it spread and spread and spread till grain in the
elevators of Western Iowa moved and stirred and answered to its
centripetal force, and men upon the streets of New York felt the
mysterious tugging of its undertow engage their feet, embrace their
bodies, overwhelm them, and carry them bewildered and unresisting
back and downwards to the Pit itself.

Nor was the Pit's centrifugal power any less. Because of some sudden
eddy spinning outward from the middle of its turmoil, a dozen
bourses of continental Europe clamoured with panic, a dozen
Old-World banks, firm as the established hills, trembled and
vibrated. Because of an unexpected caprice in the swirling of the
inner current, some far-distant channel suddenly dried, and the