United States or Eswatini ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
And in the ports, at the termini, at intermediate stations, the merchandise lay heaped up, immobilized, while the merchants, the middlemen, the manufacturers, the Government, the army were waiting, time was lapsing, and the fate of the Republic and the nation hanging in the balance.
It was on the second morning after the boys had reached New York that the Indian Queen went down the harbor, her canvas drawing merrily in the spanking breeze of dawn. The intervening day had been spent at the dock-side, where wide-breeched Dutch longshoremen were stoutly hustling bales and boxes of merchandise into the hold.
I saw the levees piled with merchandise, and a score or more of packets rushing fresh cargoes ashore mates bawling commands down the gangplanks where the roustabouts came and went at a trot. Gold-mad hundreds thronged the wagon-rutted streets of this raw little village, the commercial center of a vast new empire.
A drought of two years had created a famine throughout the land, attended by a cattle and camel plague, that had destroyed so many camels that all commerce was stagnated. No merchandise could be transported from Khartoum; thus no purchases could be made by the traders in the interior: the country, always wretched, was ruined.
Then it was that he put up his own sign: AH KIM COMPANY, GENERAL MERCHANDISE. Also, better fed, there was about his less meagre figure a foreshadowing of the melon-seed rotundity that was to attach to him in future years.
Puttiala, Makeonara, Fegonara, Oudamitta, which Lord Lake entered in 1805 in his pursuit of a Mahratta chief, and finally Amritsur were stages easily passed. Amritsur is better built than the generality of towns in Hindustan. It is the largest depôt of shawls and saffron as well as other articles of Deccan merchandise. The traveller says:
The amount of duties secured on merchandise imported since the commencement of the year is about $25,500,000, and that which will accrue during the current quarter is estimated at $5,500,000; from these $31,000,000, deducting the draw-backs, estimated at less than $7,000,000, a sum exceeding $24,000,000 will constitute the revenue of the year, and will exceed the whole expenditures of the year.
The Iroquois had seized two canoes, the property of La Salle, near Niagara; they had likewise attacked and plundered fourteen Frenchmen en route to the Illinois with merchandise valued at sixteen thousand francs. It was known, besides, that the Cayugas and the Senecas were preparing to attack the French settlements the following summer. In spite of all, the expected help did not arrive.
Sometimes they would go out at an earlier hour, while the people were in the streets and the shops were open, and amuse themselves with seizing the goods and merchandise that they found offered for sale, and assaulting all that came in their way.
The seamen were taken up several days in unlading the merchandise I had brought with me, and embarking instead all the precious things in the palace, jewels, gold and money.
Word Of The Day