A Week in Wall Street by Frederick Jackson

The following pages were written during leisure hours of the last six or eight weeks, of which “the times” have thrown rather too many upon the writer’s hands; and the statement of this fact, I conceive to be a tacit admission, that such hours might have been better employed.
They were originally composed for the writer’s own amusement; to beguile the tediousness of otherwise idle time. And not the least motive for this indulgence was a desire to abstract the mind from too near a contemplation of the dark side of that picture, which I have described as a panic. They were not written in the first place, with any view to publication, but as each chapter was successively read in the presence of friends, and principally for amusement, those friends at length advised their publication; and with their advice they have been submitted to the press, in the original manuscript, almost without correction.