wheat pit

"Are you the minority stockholder, Uncle John?" he asked, letting himself use the name by which Mr. Chadwick was best known in the wheat pit.

The stock market, the wheat pit, the cotton exchange--these were the absorbing passions of his life; his ears, sharp as those of a fox, were trained to lose no word that fell, at table, from the lips of his master and his master's friends; and whether it was owing to this, or to natural shrewdness on his part, his ventures had prospered so amazingly that he occupied a position in the eyes of his fellow-servants almost as dignified and exalted as that of his master in Wall Street.

He was favorably known on Wall Street and sometimes heard of when a corner was being manipulated in the Chicago wheat pit.

"Of course, I suppose not," agreed the would-be promoter, sucking his under lip in a way ominously familiar to his antagonists in the wheat pit.

Rotten form, not to say vicious, on the part of the Terror of the Wheat Pit, to cut off his only begotten daughter with a shilling, one meant to say its equivalent measured by the bulk of his wealth.