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When the eyes grew accustomed to the surrounding gloom they could make out on the wall some delivery-baskets, bakers' peels, smocks, caps and shoes hanging from nails, and on the ceiling thick, silvery cobwebs covered with dust. Half way along the corridor were a couple of doors opposite each other; one led to the furnace, the other to the kneading room.
First came the guilds of merchants and craftsmen, the hatters, weavers, bakers, butchers, cutlers, and goldsmiths. They wore the prescribed dress: black coats, knee breeches, low shoes and silver buckles.
One had to be pleased with a dinner at a tavern; with a glass of ice-water in a cafe, or to take part in a public ball which was opened to every one who could pay his fee of admission; and especially in the evening the public rushed to the theatre with the same eagerness that was exhibited in the morning to reach the shops of the bakers and butchers, where each received his portion of meat or bread by producing a card signed by the circuit commissioners.
Lastly, the funds resulting from the economy had been utilised to form a useful corps of 150 bakers. And thus, although the purchase of foreign grain added to the expense, the beginning of the war found the commissariat of the Egyptian Army in a thoroughly efficient state. Vast reserves of stores were quickly accumulated at Assuan.
A happy, orderly crowd it is, free from all signs of quarrelling and excess, packed more densely than usual around the shrine of Mama Hajiyani, where every little vacant space is monopolised by merry-go- rounds and by the booths of bakers and pastry-sellers.
The various places of amusement were still thronged with giddy youth and gouty old men who would have felt insulted had any one told them that the most precious thing they had was the most neglected. Everywhere, as in the time of Trajan, were unrestricted pleasures and unrestricted trades. What cared the shopkeepers and the carpenters and the bakers whether a Commodus or a Severus reigned?
A twenty years' peace, renewable by agreement, between the Holy Empire and the Sultan had been negotiated by those two sons of bakers, Cardinal Khlesl and the Vizier Etmekdschifade. It was destined to endure through all the horrors of the great war, a stronger protection to Vienna than all the fortifications which the engineering art could invent.
As he passed the newly-opened bakers' shops, he could not help wishing that he had a half-penny in the world, so that he might change it into a crown on the spot, and buy a basketful of hot rolls; but as the Gold Stone was not warranted to make money, he was forced to take it out in wishing.
You shall hear young men of intelligence and cultivation, to whom the unprecedented circumstances of this country offer opportunities of a great and beneficent career, complaining that they were born within this blighted circle regretting that they were not bakers and tallow-chandlers, and under no obligation to keep up appearances deliberately surrendering all the golden possibilities of that Future which this country, beyond all others, holds before them sighing that they are not rich enough to marry the girls they love, and bitterly upbraiding fortune that they are not millionnaires suffering the vigor of their years to exhale in idle wishes and pointless regrets disgracing their manhood by lying in wait behind their "so gentlemanly" and "aristocratic" manners, until they can pounce upon a "fortune" and ensnare an heiress into matrimony: and so having dragged their gifts, their horses of the sun, into a service which shames out of them all their native pride and power, they sink in the mire, and their peers and emulators exclaim that they have "made a good thing of it."
He occupied all the main thoroughfares and cross-roads; sentries were placed at the bakers' doors; those who had hidden themselves were compelled to bake. The octroi dues on grain were at the same time suspended at all the markets; wheat was already going down; when the Parisians went out of doors to see the riot, they couldn't find any.
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