"You will find that rather difficult to manage, friend, if they like the French fabric better."
"Never tell me, sir! It is a fancy, and a wicked fancy, that of liking French goods. Why, for wear, there is nothing like our brocades, that there was such a demand for when I was young. There was variety enough, too, in all conscience. There was the double and treble striped, and the strawberry-spotted, and----"
"O yes, I remember, Mr. Short. The first waistcoat I danced a cotillon in was such a strawberry-spotted thing as you describe. Nothing like it for wear, as you say. Down came my little Lucy in it, the other day, to make us laugh; and, to be sure, the colours are as bright as ever. But then, there is nothing like those brocades for price either."
Short hated to hear such grumbling about the prices of things as was always to be heard now that the French had got a footing in the country. In old times, those that could afford to wear silk did not grudge a good price for it.
"Very true; but many more people wear silk now; and they are of a class to whom it is of consequence to pay no more than is necessary."
"Ay; and to please them, you have wrought your web thinner and thinner, till you have made it too thin for even the cheapeners; and now you must learn from the French to give your fabric more substance."
"I am afraid we cannot do that for the same money; hey, Cooper?" said Mr. Culver, watching for the sentence which the weaver should pronounce when he should remove his magnifying glass from his eye, and give judgment on the pattern.
"I think we may do it, sir," pronounced Cooper. "I believe I see the principle of the thing; and I could make a fair imitation, I think. Not with the same body, of course. We cannot afford to put in equal material for the money; but a slighter fabric of the same pattern might sell, I have no doubt."
"If I might put in my word," said Mrs. Cooper, "I should recommend a higher price instead of a slighter fabric. It is more for the substance than the pattern that the French silks are preferred, I have heard say."
"My dear," said her husband, "I cannot pretend to rival a French weaver, if you give me leave to use all the silk that ever passed through a foreigner's loom. That is a point above me. So we had better content ourselves with a likeness as to figure and price.--I cannot conceive," he continued, as he turned the pattern over and over, and held it in various lights, "how the foreigners can afford their silks at such a price as to tempt our shopkeepers to the risk of the contraband trade."