There, under the guidance of his father's friend, he was
instructed in the mysteries of bulling and of bearing, in the strange
usages of 'Change in the intricacies of carrying over and of
transferring. He learned to know where to place his clients' money,
which of the jobbers would make a price in New Zealands, and which would
touch nothing but American rails, which might be trusted and which
shunned. All this, and much more, he mastered, and to such purpose that
he soon began to prosper, to retain the clients who had been recommended
to him, and to attract fresh ones. But the work was never congenial.
He had inherited from his father his love of the air of heaven, his
affection for a manly and natural existence. To act as middleman
between the pursuer of wealth, and the wealth which he pursued, or to
stand as a human barometer, registering the rise and fall of the great
mammon pressure in the markets, was not the work for which Providence
had placed those broad shoulders and strong limbs upon his well knit
frame. His dark open face, too, with his straight Grecian nose, well
opened brown eyes, and round black-curled head, were all those of a man
who was fashioned for active physical work.
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