assisting in preparation for the dinner.

Sitting down near

"Papa has treated

the table, I produced my little store. himself," I said, "to a part of a holiday, and there is something to show that he has not forgotten the children." Alice received the combs as a token of good fortune, the rest went quietly to work with the fruit.

I know you have by your

"You have made some money, looks, papa; and it's only a week!"

CHAPTER IX.

THE ACTUAL.

THOSE who, attracted by the title of these papers, have taken them up with the expectation of reading “startling developments," "wonderful disclosures," "remarkable confessions," or fancied in the various descriptions they would be able to see through the gauze covering which should lightly mask a battery of satire upon certain notabilities of various grades, have ere this laid the undercurrents aside, disappointed, and probably in disgust. For, in presenting a narrative of some periods of my life, I have no animosity to gratify, no wounded pride to revenge, no shaft of ridicule to launch, and indeed nothing but the simple truth to record. Whoever shall recognize me through the name I have assumed, and happen to recall any of the incidents I now publish, will bear witness that I write with no malice and without exaggeration. We are all jogging along together. The various circumstances which now serve for daily excitement will soon pass and be forgotten; but the relations of one man to another, and of one set of men to another set of men, extend through generations, affecting our whole social life. What we want now, it seems to me, is to be introduced to the actual. What lies as substratum ? What is the original necessity, and what the conventional ? The

various classes of mankind are all occupied. What are they about? To find out is the present fascination.

One man drives to his office in Wall-street in a handsome carriage. How did he get that carriage, or rather, how was the money acquired that paid for it? He spends a few hours there, signs his name to several bits of paper, which put in motion various pieces of machinery, which produce for him certain valuable results. Satisfied with these results, and very complacent with the day's operation, he goes back to his house, dines sumptuously, drinks his wine, smokes his cigars, attends the opera; and this is the history of that man's life, from one year to another, and the man himself is one of a species.

Another trudges to Wall-street a poor, unfortunate wretch with a family, in circumstances the most straitened.

He is a better educated man than the first, has a more cultivated taste, is honester-worth more for soul and brain anywhere. Standing side by side before God, this is so. Looking at both, away from so dread a tribunal, we see one clad in garments originally expensive, but carefully brushed till they are threadbare. We behold a face exhibiting traces of much mental suffering. We observe in the lines which mark it evidences of the struggles of the man as he resisted, step by step, the fate which was in store for him. We all remember the story of the prisoner who fancied one morning, as he awoke, that the walls of the lofty apartment in which he was confined did not seem as high as usual. Regarding the number of apertures in his grated window, he discovered the next morning one less. Another had disappeared the following day, and while he was reflecting on the singular circum

stance, the terrible truth burst on him, that by the slow but sure action of the machinery which controlled the movable iron ceiling, he was to meet his death. Day by day it descended nearer and nearer. There was no escape-no hope of an escape. The man we are looking at is in the same sort of prison-house. His fate is just as certain, the machinery which is to crush him just as effectual. And he knows it. That is the meaning of those lines over the countenance and that despairing expression.

But the other man? The man who signs bits of papers, who moves fortunes by the employment of his name; whose face, without any lines of care or disappointment, shows that he is at ease in Bank as well as in Zion? This person, by a long and successful career of good fortune, is so well grounded in his own esteem, that his self-complacency is at times painful to witness. How patronizing he is, how jocose, how pleasingly familiar, how hard and overbearing, as by turns he comes in contact with different classes and conditions! What does such a man understand about the great objects and purposes of life? What have his operations in the stock-market, his transactions in bills of exchange, his advances on good security, taught him about the first question in the catechism: "What is the chief end of man?" By the light he lives and works by, how would he answer it?

Now let us have an introduction to these people with fortunes and habits so different. Put the novelists and romancewriters aside. We do not want any hot-house developments, any big, horrid villains, any sweet, charming bread-andbutter saints. Away with caricatures and exaggerations!

Let us look at Harris and Williams, and Brown and Johnson, and Jones and Smith, and see what they do; how, as types of their class, they get a living. For the fellow who works with those aforesaid pieces of paper claims in a sense to get a living, to make money, whereby he lives and pays for houses and horses and opera-boxes, and his-pleasures.

These investigations will serve to bring the fortunate and the unfortunate nearer each other; as it is, there is a great abyss between them. If we could bridge it over and mix them up a little, it would not do any harm. It might do some good. After these "Undercurrents" of mine are concluded, I propose to present a volume to several of our wellknown philanthropists: that class of philanthropists who, born with a silver spoon in their mouth, and without much masculinity, and having been educated by good pious parents and left with large fortunes, are persuaded they have a mission to perform here below before they are translated into heaven. These distinguished persons are life-members of the Bible Society, the Home Missionary Society, the Foreign Missionary Society, the Tract Society, and the Colonization Society. They preside at meetings, they head subscriptionlists, they occupy prominent positions in the church; and, notwithstanding these important engagements, they do not know what to do with their time or their money. They are moral, and wont spend either in the pleasures of this life, for this sort of things don't suit their temperament. So they take to courses more sedate, and which will give them an enviable prominence before the world.

Now, as I have just said, I intend to attempt to interest these worthy people in the situation of Wall-street.

I am