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The young taleb showed great consequence and presented me with the original. He observed that a metegal of gold is of the value of 33½ Tunisian piastres. The Taleb: "I, I enter the house of an infidel! God preserve me!" "Oh!" I observed, "you are afraid of me and my books my books will bite you." Hereupon all the people present burst into a loud laugh, and the taleb looked quite crest-fallen.
Of this all the doors of the houses and the lighter works are made. Wood for fireing is brought in from The Sahara, but from a great distance. It is sold for three Tunisian piastres the camel-load. It is the common brush-wood, underwood, or scrub of The Desert, and is excessively dry, for withered and dead trees or shrubs are gathered.
Stuart, the fat Birmingham clergyman, was thrashing out a question of piastres with a noisy donkey-boy, and the others were joining in with chaff and advice. Then the hubbub died away, the party from above came down the ladder, there were "good-nights," the shutting of doors, and the little steamer lay silent, dark, and motionless in the shadow of the high Halfa bank.
In Mohammedan countries generally it is a comely smooth-skinned Dudù, patient and submissive, always in good humor with her master, economical in house-living to suit the meanness, and gorgeous in occasional attire to suit the ostentation, of the genuine Oriental; but by no means Dudù ever asleep and unoccupied; for, if not allowed to take part in active outside life, the Eastern's wife or wives have their home duties and their maternal cares like all other women, and find to their cost that, if they neglect them unduly, they will have a bad time of it with Ali Ben Hassan when the question comes of piastres and sequins, and the dogs of Jews who demand payment, and the pigs of Christians who follow suit.
The bicycle is something he never saw on his boat before; but the idea that these things may now become common among the passengers wanders through his mind, and that obtaining backsheesh on this particular occasion will establish a precedent that may be very handy hereafter; so he makes a most respectful salaam, calls me "Bey Effendi," and smilingly requests two piastres backsheesh.
I had been made acquainted, through the commercial correspondence between Hamburg and Paris, with a great financial operation, planned by M. Ouvrard, in consequence of which he was to obtain piastres from Spanish America at a price much below the real value; and I had learned that he was obliged to support this enterprise by the funds which he and his partners previously employed in victualling the forces.
The Surra for Mekka is distributed in the mosque, under the windows of the Kadhy's house, after the departure of the Hadj. There are persons who receive so small a sum as one piastre; the greater number from ten to twenty piastres; but there are a few Although not always given to the most worthy, many poor families derive support from this allowance.
To these importations of the Havannah we must add: hardware and furniture, more than half a million of piastres; iron and steel, 380,000 piastres; planks and great timber, 400,000 piastres; Castile soap, 300,000 piastres.
There one might see strange pots and plates, and withered rushes, and fantastic greenish draperies of Eastern weft, which, however, would not fetch five piastres a yard in the bazaar of Stamboul, curious water-colors said to represent "impressions," though one would be shy of meeting, beyond the bounds of an insane asylum, the individual whose impressions could take so questionable a shape; lastly, the centre of the collection, a "polka mazurka harmony in yellow," by Sardanapalus Stiggins, the great impressionist painter of the day.
Congress, anxious to please the new ruler, whose power of domination had already become so evident, had allotted to His Excellency the Dictator an annual allowance of 9,000 piastres. Francia definitely refused to accept more than one-third of this, and, moreover, continued firm in his refusal, alleging that the State was far more in need of money than he.
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