nine o'clock
There were men in top hats , and women in silks ; rough fellows of the poorer streets , and gaudily dressed queens of obscure neighborhoods , while mixed with these one saw the faded and shabby wrecks that perennially drifted about the Board of Trade , the failures who sat on the chairs of the customers ' rooms day in and day out , reading old newspapers , smoking vile cigars . And there were young men of the type of clerks and bookkeepers , young men with drawn , worn faces , and hot , tired eyes , who pressed upward , silent , their lips compressed , listening intently to the indefinite echoing murmur that was filling the building . For on this morning of the thirteenth of June , the Board of Trade , its halls , corridors , offices , and stairways were already thrilling with a vague and terrible sound . It was only a little after nine o'clock . The trading would not begin for another half hour , but , even now , the mutter of the whirlpool , the growl of the Pit was making itself felt . The eddies were gathering ; the thousands of subsidiary torrents that fed the cloaca were moving . From all over the immediate neighborhood they came , from the offices of hundreds of commission houses , from brokers ' offices , from banks , from the tall , grey buildings of La Salle Street , from the street itself .