Suddenly my attention was attracted to another boy,
who, even as I had been a few minutes ago, was now
busily writing. I kept my eye on him, and when
he had finished his work, and was walking across the
room with a piece of paper in his hand, I followed
him eagerly. He was at least twelve; I was only
nine. Can you wonder that he seemed to me almost
the last word in wisdom? So I followed him.
Could it really be that my poster had forstalled his?
What glory if it were so! He pinned up his notice.
He moved away, and I read it. It said: “VOTE
FOR THE SHAR.”
You can imagine my feelings. I went hot all over.
“Shar,” of course, not “Shah.”
How ever could I have been such an idiot as to have
thought it was “Shah”? S-h-a-h obviously
spelt shash, not shar. How nearly I had exposed
my appalling ignorance to my fellows! “Vote
for the—“; I blushed again, hardly
able to think of it. And oh! how thankful I was
now that everybody else had been too busy to read my
poster. Hastily I went over to it, and tore it
down; hastily I went back to my desk and wrote another
poster. Observe me now again. I am writing
in bold capitals on a piece of exercise paper:
“VOTE FOR THE SHAR.”
And the moral? Well, my omnibus has now; fetched
its compass round Victoria, we are back on the main
route again, and I think I must leave the moral to
you.
High Finance
I know very little about the Stock Exchange.
I know, of course, that stockbrokers wear very shiny
top-hats, which they remove when they sing “God
Save the King,” as they invariably do in a crisis.
When they go out to lunch, the younger ones leave
their top-hats behind them, and take the air with
plastered polls; and after lunch is over, young and
old alike have a round of dominoes before placing threepence
under the coffee-cup and returning to business.
If business is slack, they tell each other jokes,
which get into the papers with some such introduction
as, “A good story going the round of the Stock
Exchange.” Probably it was going the round
of the nurseries in 72, but the stockbrokers have
been so busy making Consols go up and down that they
have not been able to listen to it before. Anyway,
the careful man always avoids a good story which is
going the round of the Stock Exchange.
But apart from these minor activities of the City,
the financial world has always been a mystery to me.
To this day I do not understand why Consols go up
and down. Perhaps they only go down now, but there
was a time when they would be 78 1/4 in the morning,
78 1/2 after the Stock Exchange had returned from
its coffee, and 78 when it went out to play dominoes
again. When they thudded down to 78, this proved
that the Government had lost the confidence of the
country. But I never heard an explanation of
it all which carried any conviction.
