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"'What will your excellency give me if I find him the thief? "'I will give you a piastre. "'I must have two. "'You shall. Hallo! What are you doing? "'I am stealing your silk handkerchief. "'In order to find my cambric one? "'Yes. "'And where will both of them be? "'In the same pocket. The person to whom I shall give this handkerchief is the same to whom I have already given the other.
"Thy sentence had no limit." "I could not die there," said the hollow voice, and the head sank farther forward. "Year after year I lived there, but I could not die among them. I was no leper; I am no leper. My penalty was my penalty, and I paid it to the full, piastre by piastre of my body and my mind. It was not one death, it was death every hour, every day I stayed. I had no mind.
"I will show you how, Xavier," he said; "as to climbing the balconies, there is a convenance in it, as in all else. For instance, one must be daring, and discreet, and nimble, and ready to give the law a presentable answer, and lacking that, a piastre. And then the fair one must be a fair one indeed." "Diable, Michie," cried Xavier, "you are ze mischief."
"Yes," said a fourth, preparing to take a similar liberty with Miss Damer. This was too much for Mr. Ingram. He had already used very positive language in his endeavour to assure his tormentors that they would not get a piastre from him. But this only changed their soft persuasions into threats.
The Bedouins, however, refuse to take the Egyptian piastres, even at a depreciation, and will receive nothing but dollars; a determination to which the Pasha himself has been frequently obliged to yield. Forty paras make a piastre; but in the time of the Hadj, when small change is necessary for the immense daily traffic of the pilgrims, the serafs gave twenty-five paras only in
Among their effects I find some bread and a cucumber, which I forthwith confiscate, leaving a two and a half piastre metallique piece in its stead; the affrighted women are watching me from the safe distance of three hundred yards; when they return and discover the coin they will wish some 'cycler would happen along and frighten them away on similar conditions every day.
"Now sew a piastre into one corner of the scarf with crimson silk sew half a piastre into another corner sew a peseta here and a two-real piece there; then, in the middle you must sew a gold coin a doubloon would be best." The doubloon and all the other coins were duly sewn in. "Now give me the scarf, and I'll take it to the Campo Santo when midnight strikes.
"Give him a piastre, my boy; we shall meet with others in want, and you must reserve something for them." "Oh! young gentleman," said the poor mutilated lad, looking with wonder at the coin which represented sixteen days' work, "we will all pray for you!" And he hurried to clear out the bag, which was already too full.
A horse in the extremities of nature, or near to the articulo mortis, was sold for a piastre, eight pence; a camel, in a like situation, was sold for a piastre and a half. A tolerably good horse in Tunis sells at from 800 to 1000 piastres. There are the remains of an aqueduct at Gilma, and several other buildings, the capitals of the pillars being elaborately worked.
But in these distant countries no doubt is ever entertained of the news brought by a white man from the capital. The profit of the traders in oil amounts to seventy or eighty per cent; for the Indians sell it them at the price of a piastre a jar or botija, and the expense of carriage is not more than two-fifths of a piastre per jar.
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