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"What is the matter with him?" asked Frowenfeld. "He is getting old." The Creole extended the purse carelessly to the apothecary. "Has it anything inside?" "But a single pistareen." "That is why she wanted the basilic, eh?" "I do not understand you, sir." "Do you not know what she was going to do with it?" "With the basil? No sir."

Lie there, poor Straight-Horns, if quiet thou canst be after such strange butchery. Reuben, I paid thee, as the sun rose, a Spanish piece in silver, for the trifle of debt that lay between us, in behalf of the good turn thou didst the shoes, which were none the better for the last hunt in the hills. Hast ever that pistareen about thee?"

By-and-by Ali borrowed a third piece of money, and then a fourth and then a fifth, so that by the time that six months had passed and gone he had spent thirty of the hundred pieces that had been found, and in all that time Abdallah had used not so much as a pistareen. But when Ali came for the thirty-and-first loan, Abdallah refused to let him have any more money.

You can figure up how much a cheese that tips the steelyard at twenty pounds and three ounces will come to at three pence ha'penny per pound. You know, or you ought to know, the difference between a pistareen and a smooth-faced shilling. When you truck and dicker, you've got to remember that the other feller is doing it all the time, while you will be as green as a pumpkin in August.

I find that God has been at work below me, in a mass of minute and munificent detail, by the side of which my life is great and simple, and satisfyingly significant. So, if I may not believe in a "pistareen Providence," I must make a God of the universe itself, or pass into the hands of many Gods the world's creation and governance.

Bird, bee, blossom be my teacher. I do not like Mr. Emerson's lesson. The logical sequence of disbelief in what Mr. Emerson calls a "pistareen Providence" is a belief in pantheism or polytheism.

Emerson becomes equally flippant and irreverent when he speaks of a "pistareen Providence."

Soon what is shouted in Boston will be spoken in Albany, whispered in Philadelphia, winked and nodded in Williamsburg, thought in Charleston. And how will it be here, with us? Let me tell you, Mr. Cross, we are really in an alien country here. The high Germans above us, like that Herkimer you saw here Tuesday, do you think they care a pistareen for the King?

"A modest tongue, thou midnight scamperer! look to my geldings Here here are two Dutch florins, three stivers, and a Spanish pistareen for thee; one of the florins is for thy old mother, and with the others thou canst lighten thy heart in the Paus merrymakings if I hear that either of thy rascally cousins, or the English Diomede, has put a leg across beast of mine, it will be the worse for all Africa!

Do you term that perpetual, pistareen, paste-pot work, American art, American drama, taste, verse? I think I hear, echoed as from some mountain-top afar in the west, the scornful laugh of the Genius of these States. Democracy, in silence, biding its time, ponders its own ideals, not of literature and art only not of men only, but of women. Far, far, indeed, stretch, in distance, our Vistas!