Kenosha Telegraph

THE BOURSE

Those of our readers who are interested in stock and market reports, have all read of the 'Bourse,' though the number that know just what it is, we suspect is somewhat limited. We infer it to be a sort of a Merchant's Exchange in Paris, like that in Wall street, New York. 'Bell Smith,' the instructive and amusing foreign correspondent of the National Era, visited it and thus writes about it to that paper:

While looking at the triflers on the pavement, I heard above the uproar of voitures, stages, street criers, and hand-organs—a din of voices sounding like the supernumerary huzzas of the stage, on the entrance of some royal personage. I could scarcely credit that they came from the interior of the beautiful edifice before us, yet such was the fact. The Bourse was in full operation of a Frenchman's idea of business. I was so impressed with it, that I insisted upon inspecting the singular concern closer; and, the same day, we made the visit. Going to the front, we passed two imposing figures, cut in dark stone, and purporting to represent the genius of Commerce and Peace. We ascended a flight of steps, gave our parasols to an attendant old lady as we entered the door, and proceeded up a winding flight to the gallery. The sight and sounds were startling. We looked down upon what seemed a mob in black, running, shouting, crowding, and gesticulating. In a circular pen near the counter, protected by an iron-rail, were a few bald patriarchs, whose chief business seemed to be to receive slips of paper, and toss them out again. Out of the confusion I could make nothing. For a while I kept 'the run' of a little fellow in a gray coat. He darted through the crowd—he faced corpulent men, and dared them to the combat—he danced wildly—he seized slips of paper, and shook them at the pen—he rushed back, and deliberated with five or six, who negotiated by shaking their fists and performing a sort of shaker quadrille—he flew back, but 'like Cuff's speckled pig,' he became at last too active to count, and I left in perfect despair. I remain to this hour in ignorance of what the little fellow effected—what went up or fell, I leave to older heads to know and to remember.

This is the Bourse—the political thermometer of France indeed, of Europe. While on the 'Franklin,' in the channel, the passengers gathered round the first London Times we received, to learn the news, and hear whether Russia had marched on Turkey. One of them said; 'Look to the quotations—how are the funds? That tells the story.' And surely it did. The slightest shock in the most distant quarter of Europe, vibrates in that noisy hall, to the death of many fortunes.