First thing you know he’s thrown up his honest, humdrum position⁠—oh, I’ve seen it hundreds of times⁠—and takes to hanging round the customers’ rooms down there on La Salle Street, and he makes a little, and makes a little more, and finally he is so far in that he can’t pull out, and then some billionaire fellow, who has the market in the palm of his hand, tightens one finger, and our young man is ruined, body and mind. He’s lost the taste, the very capacity for legitimate business, and he stays on hanging round the Board till he gets to be⁠—all of a sudden⁠—an old man. And then some day someone says, ‘Why, where’s So-and-so?’ and you wake up to the fact that the young fellow has simply disappeared⁠—lost. I tell you the fascination of this Pit gambling is something no one who hasn’t experienced it can have the faintest conception of. I believe it’s worse than liquor, worse than morphine. Once you get into it, it grips you and draws you and draws you, and the nearer you get to the end the easier it seems to win, till all of a sudden, ah! there’s the whirlpool.⁠ ⁠… ‘

J. ,’ keep away from it, my boy.”