It would be difficult to find anywhere a more intelligent and interesting group of men than the members of the New York Stock Exchange. Some of them are men of peculiar personal charm, others are distinguished for especial ability in various ways, others are men with hobbies, nearly every one knows something that is worth knowing, and, what is better, talks of what he knows in the manner of culture. Given an idle hour with a wish to learn, and every dip of the net into the intellectual waters of this gathering brings up some new and delightful specimen to amuse and instruct.
The dean of the Stock Exchange, for example, who has been an active member for fifty-five years, and who is now eighty, spends several months of each year in exploring all the little nooks and crannies of the globe, remote and inaccessible places that are _terra incognita_ to your casual tourist. He is a mine of information; to know him means, in a way, a liberal education. If you are fortunate enough to have an hour’s chat with him (for when at work on the floor he is quite as active as any other youngster), you will find yourself in contact with a traveler of rare charm and culture, who will take you into strange lands of which the mere existence is but a faint recollection of your schoolboy studies.
He will tell you, with all his delightfully fresh and buoyant enthusiasm, of Agra and its Pearl Mosque, and of the surpassing beauty of the world’s architectural masterpiece--the Taj Mahal--with its marbles, its mosaics, and its lapis-lazuli. He will take you into Thibet, the Forbidden Land, through the jungles of the faraway Celebes, into the least-known corners of the Straits Settlements, and to the lonely isle of Robinson Crusoe. On his vacation next year he is going to the Falkland Islands, somewhere down Patagonia way, and the year after a letter may come from him sent out from the headwaters of the Yukon, or ferried down the Congo from Stanley Falls. Wherever his fancy roams, there this adventurer goes; no thought of sickness or danger or difficulty is permitted to interfere with his delightful hobby.
Naturally, in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Stock Exchange tastes are catholic and run to wide extremes. One of the members is a student of Russian literature in all its phases; he can tell you of its folklore, its peasantism, its liberal thought and its ethical ideals of society; Dostoyevski is his hobby and Melshin the poet. Beside him stands a man who has mastered the culinary art; the joy of his life is to prepare with his own hands, for the palates of his fastidious guests, dainty dishes and wonderful sauces that make an invitation to his table something worth having. One of the members is an animated concordance of Shelley, whom he studies with almost fanatical zeal; another is a disciple of Heine, whom he adores. There stands a man who went into the heart of Africa as no white man had ever done--through Somaliland into Abyssinia, thence to Lake Rudolph to hunt elephants, south to Victoria Nyanza, and finally, after hunting all the wild game of the district, on foot to the West Coast.