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Once in the course of that day he left his post by the landau, and went for a solitary ramble; not amongst the tents, where black-eyed Bohemians saluted him as "my pretty gentleman," or the knock-'em-downs and weighing-machines, or the bucolic babble of the ring, but away across the grassy slope, turning his back upon the racecourse.
Then there were the weighing-machines, arm-chairs covered with red velvet, in which you were invited to sit and be weighed; there was the sponge-dealer, a Turk in a turban, who confided to the crowd, in broken English, not only the price of his sponges, but also many touching and interesting details of his personal history.
It seemed very singular though, of course, I immediately classified it as an English characteristic to see a great many portable weighing-machines, the owners of which cried out, continually and amain, "Come, know your weight! Come, come, know your weight to-day!
Far from it; clocks, thermometers, weather-vanes, and weighing-machines they are but the remnants of the fine old communal life of which our urban and Anglo-Saxon civilisation has kept only too little. We do not lounge about and take our meals in the public squares as people used to do in Athens and still do in Sicily.
All weighing-machines cheat, but, if cheat they must, give me the machine that flatly refuses to budge from zero after it has swallowed your coin. I prefer that kind to the spasmodic machine on which the indicator moves forward one hundred pounds every two minutes and leaves a person utterly uncertain as to whether he should immediately begin dieting or purchase a bottle of codliver oil.
This proposition throws a new light upon the question of weighing-machines and steelyards, and, after some little deliberation, it is resolved to abide by the old plan of letting the white trader decide the weight himself in his own way, for it is clear that the steelyard is a great medicine which no brave can understand, and which can only be manipulated by a white medicine-man.
The fun, the enjoyment, is universal. There is nothing of the complicated apparatus which an English fair requires, none of the contrivances to make people laugh the clowns, the cheap-jacks, the moveable theatres, the vans with fat women and two-headed calves, the learned pigs, the peepshows, the peripatetic photographers, the weighing-machines, the swings, the merry-go-rounds.
Look at the green ledgers with red backs, like strong cricket-balls beaten flat; the court-guides directories, day-books, almanacks, letter-boxes, weighing-machines for letters, rows of fire-buckets for dashing out a conflagration in its first spark, and saving the immense wealth in notes and bonds belonging to the company; look at the iron safes, the clock, the office seal in its capacious self, security for anything.
"A fee must be marked upon the brief of learned counsel, and that fee be paid to him, together with many other smaller fees; for learned counsel is like the cigarette-boxes and new-fashioned weighing-machines at the stations: he does not work unless you drop something down him. But there is nothing to prevent learned counsel from returning that fee, and all the little fees.
It seemed very singular though, of course, I immediately classified it as an English characteristic to see a great many portable weighing-machines, the owners of which cried out continually and amain, "Come, know your weight! Come, come, know your weight to-day!
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