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It was not far from eleven o'clock when the comrades shook hands, in a thick fog, in which the gaslights looked like the orange pedlers' paper lanterns. Ugh! how damp it was! "Good-by." "I will see you again soon." "Good-night to the ladies."
And moreover a legal maxim caveat emptor, "Let the buyer beware" made cheating legally safe. Dealers in clothing guaranteed neither fit nor quality, and anything you paid for, once wrapped up and in your hands, was yours beyond recall "Business is business," was a maxim that covered many sins. A few hundred years ago business was transacted mostly through fairs and ships, and by pedlers.
It would be hard to over-estimate the force of this latter element of disintegration and discouragement among a people where every citizen at home, and every soldier in the field, is a reader of newspapers. The pedlers of rumor in the North were the most effective allies of the rebellion.
For the most part, the early Lancashire manufacturers started very nearly equal in point of worldly circumstances, men originally of the smallest means often coming to the front work men, weavers, mechanics, pedlers, farmers, or labourers in course of time rearing immense manufacturing concerns by sheer force of industry, energy, and personal ability.
Thither annually came all manner of horse-jockeys and pedlers, gentlemen and beggars, fortune- tellers, wrestlers, dancers and fiddlers, gay young farmers and buxom maidens. Strong drink abounded. They who had good-naturedly wrestled and joked together in the morning not unfrequently closed the day with a fight, until, like the revellers of Donnybrook,
And instantly there arise demands for taxes, recruits, the temptations of vodka, weddings, festivals; petty pedlers make their rounds through the villages, and all sorts of other temptations crop up; and by this road, or, if not, by some other, wealth of the most varied description vegetables, calves, cows, horses, pigs, chickens, eggs, butter, hemp, flax, rye, oats, buckwheat, pease, hempseed, and flaxseed all passes into the hands of strangers, is carried off to the towns, and thence to the capitals.
The two guides insisted upon going on foot, the better to discharge their duties. They rode through some of the principal streets, looked into the shops, and observed the pedlers; but all was about the same as in Hong-Kong, except that the streets were wider in the latter. The same goods were for sale.
J and I now wandered by ourselves along a circular line of quays, having, on one side of us, a thick forest of masts, while, on the other, was a sweep of shops, bookstalls, sailors' restaurants and drinking-houses, fruit-sellers, candy-women, and all manner of open-air dealers and pedlers; little children playing, and jumping the rope, and such a babble and bustle as I never saw or heard before; the sun lying along the whole sweep, very hot, and evidently very grateful to those who basked in it.
Instead, they found the polls surrounded with ticket pedlers shouting: "Walk right up here now, and get your Unconditional-Union-Abraham-Lincoln -tickets!" "Here's your straight-haired prosecution-of-the-war ticket." "Vote the Lincoln ticket; vote to whip the Rebels, and make peace with them when they've laid down their arms." "Don't vote a McClellan ticket and gratify Rebels, everywhere," etc.
Here, too, are pedlers from Hamburg, and Bavaria, and Poland, with their sharp Jewish faces, and black, keen eyes. At this moment, beneath my window are two sturdy, sunbrowned Swiss maidens grinding music for a livelihood, rehearsing in a strange Yankee land the simple songs of their old mountain home, reminding me, by their foreign garb and language, of "Lauterbrunnen's peasant girl."
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