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Meantime, do you remember that this peculiar country enjoys paying money for value not received? I am an alien, and for the life of me I cannot see why six shillings should be paid for eighteen-penny caps, or eight shillings for half-crown cigar-cases. When the country fills up to a decently populated level a few million people who are not aliens will be smitten with the same sort of blindness.
Three miles is an hour's walk for a lady an eighteen-penny cab-fare the distance from Hyde Park Corner to the Bank an express train could do it in three minutes, or a racehorse in five.
They produced a mouse, price eighteen-pence, and this mouse produced a mountain, viz., the total English literature. O day and night, but this is wondrous strange! The total English literature not the tottle only, but the tottle of the whole, like an oak and the masts of some great amiral, that once slept in an acorn absolutely lying hid in an eighteen-penny pamphlet!
As the stamps had to be paid for in advance, and as, besides, there was an eighteen-penny duty on every advertisement, it was not quite such an easy matter to run a paper then as it has since become. I fancy the old-established journals suffered much by the change, which completely revolutionized the newspaper trade; at any rate, so far as the country was concerned.
Osborne, received a little eighteen-penny book, with Athene engraved on it, and a pompous Latin inscription from the professor to his young friend. The selfishness of the late Napoleon Bonaparte occasioned innumerable wars in Europe, and caused him to perish himself in a miserable island that of St. Helena in the Atlantic Ocean.
The cabman smiled; and that smile between those two deep hollows was surely as strange as ever shone on a human face. "You may say that," he said. "Well, what does it amount to? Before I picked you up, I had one eighteen-penny fare to-day; and yesterday I took five shillings. And I've got seven bob a day to pay for the cab, and that's low, too.
The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses warranted to last five years.
Bluck, the neglected young pupil of three-and-twenty from the agricultural district, and that idle young scapegrace of a Master Todd before mentioned, received little eighteen-penny books, with "Athene" engraved on them, and a pompous Latin inscription from the professor to his young friends. The family of this Master Todd were hangers-on of the house of Osborne.
"Ritchie now! you know I meant no such thing!" "You know, it is just what will happen continually." "Of course there will be failures, but this is so abominable, when they had those nice frocks, and those two beautiful eighteen-penny shawls! There are three shillings out of my pound thrown away!" "Perhaps there was some reason to prevent them. We will go and see."
One day, when Edmund and Charles had been at home about a week, the latter ran eagerly into the sitting-parlour, crying out "Oh, mamma! there is Betty's sister down stairs, with the poor little twins in her arms, which were born just when Matilda came; they have short frocks now, but I perceive they have no shoes: suppose we young ones subscribe, and buy them some, poor things! there is my eighteen-penny piece for shoes, mamma shoes, and hats too, if we can raise money enough."
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