Certainly, if the animals could have spoken, they would have expressed their surprise at the different language the Major held as a buyer and as a seller; as a buyer, when like Gil Blas’ mule, he made them out to be all faults, as a seller when they suddenly seemed to become paragons of perfection. He was always ready for a deal, and would accommodate matters to people’s convenience—take part cash, part corn, part hay, part anything, for he was a most miscellaneous barterer, and his stable loft was like a Marine Store-dealer’s shop. Though always boasting that his little white hands were not “soiled with trade,” he would traffic in anything (on the sly) by which he thought he could turn a penny. His last effort in the buying way had nearly got him into the County Court, as the following correspondence will show, as also how differently two people can view the same thing.
Being in town, with wheat at 80s. and barley and oats in proportion, and consequently more plethoric in the pocket than usual, he happened to stray into a certain great furniture mart where two chairs struck him as being cheap. They were standing together, and one of them was thus ticketed:
No. 8205.
2 Elizabethan chairs.
India Japanned.
43 s.
The Major took a good stare at them, never having seen any before. Well, he thought they could not be dear at that; little more than a guinea each. Get them home for fifty shillings, say. There was a deal of gold, and lacker, and varnish about them. Coloured bunches of flowers, inlaid with mother of pearl, Chinese temples, with “insolent pig-tailed barbarians,” in pink silk jackets, with baggy blue trowsers, and gig whips in their hands, looking after the purple ducks on the pea-grcen lake—all very elegant.
He’d have them, dashed if he wouldn’t! Would try and swap them for Mrs. Rocket Larkspur’s Croydon basket-carriage that the girls wanted. Just the things to tickle her fancy. So he went into the office and gave his card most consequentially, with a reference to Pannell, the sadler in Spur Street, Leicestor-square, desiring that the chairs might be most carefully packed and forwarded to him by the goods train with an invoice by post.
When the invoice came, behold! the 43s. had changed into 86s.
“Hilloa!” exclaimed the astonished Major. This won’t do! 86s. is twice 43s.; and he wrote off to say they had made a mistake. This brought the secretary of the concern, Mr. Badbill, on to the scene. He replied beneath a copious shower of arms, orders, flourish, and flannel, that the mistake was the Major’s—that they, “never marked their goods in pairs,” to which the Major rejoined, that they had in this instance, as the ticket which he forwarded to Pannell for Badbill’s inspection showed, and that he must decline the chairs at double the price they were ticketed for.
Badbill, having duly inspected the ticket, retorted that he was surprised at the Major’s stupidity, that two meant one, in fact, all the world over.
The Major rejoined, that he didn’t know what the Reform Bill might have done, but that two didn’t mean one when he was at school; and added, that as he declined the chairs at 86s. they were at Badhill’s service for sending for.
Badbill wrote in reply—