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At our meetings there was an impudent, unblushing, self-conceited fellow of the name of Perry, a miller and corn-dealer of Bath, who was always sure to contradict and insult any one who dared advance a liberal opinion; in which outrageous conduct he never failed to receive the support of those gentlemen bag-men, when any of them happened to be present; so that every young man, whatever were his pretensions to talent, was compelled to keep silence, unless he concurred with the ignorant and slavish doctrines of this hectoring jobber in grain, and the still more consequential knights of the bag.
As he grew older there arose a special reason why he should become able to speak for himself. His father, who was also named Demosthenes, had been a rich man. He was a manufacturer of swords or knives, in which he employed thirty-two slaves; and also had a couch or bed factory, employing twenty more. His mother was the daughter of a rich corn-dealer of the Bosphorus.
I thought the walls must be dyed with ink. Every one laughed, and that was the end of it. If nothing comes out, nothing is said; and if everything comes out, it only raises a laugh. You had better laugh too! Or will it please you better to be shoved out into the world from the threshold of the corn-dealer, and sell matches with two kreutzers profit a day?
Ay, and will not Lescauts the corn-dealer, and Philippon the silk-merchant, come to him with bribes, and go free? And de Fonvelle and de Curtin they with a DE, forsooth! plead their nobility, and grease his hands, and go free? Ay, and " "Silence, woman!" the man said again, looking apprehensively at me, and from me to my attendants, who were grinning broadly.
By and by he came to a corn-merchant's shop, at the side of the road, and being hungry he bethought himself of the red stone, and taking it out, offered it to the corn-dealer in exchange for a bite and sup, as he had no money in his pocket.
In a second my two men stood over him. "In the King's name," La Trape cried; "let no man interfere." "Raise him up," I continued, "and set him before me; and Curtin also, and Fonvelle, and Philippon; and Lescaut, the corn-dealer, if he is here." I spoke boldly, but I felt some misgiving.
The barber's wife, when she found the field so beautifully ploughed, laughed heartily at the success of her stratagem, and going to the corn-dealer's shop, borrowed some rice to sow in the field. This the corn-dealer willingly gave her, for he reckoned he would get it back threefold at harvest time.
The weather changed; the sunlight, which had been like tin for weeks, assumed the hues of topaz. The temperament of the welkin passed from the phlegmatic to the sanguine; an excellent harvest was almost a certainty; and as a consequence prices rushed down. All these transformations, lovely to the outsider, to the wrong-headed corn-dealer were terrible.
You write back pointing out that to have recourse to an ironmonger or a corn-dealer will only entail delay and disappointment, and suggest an application to a bookseller as the most hopeful thing you can think of. In a day or two she writes again: "It is all right; I have borrowed it from your aunt."
"The twelve thousand bushels of corn were sold at nine florins the bushel to a corn-dealer of Raab, I see, thus making a total of one hundred and eight thousand florins, although I notice from the newspapers that good wheat was selling all the time at Pest at twelve florins the bushel, and the corn might easily have been transported thither, for, owing to the inundations, the oxen had no work to do."
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