Bluegrass.
Romance that is not perpetual, but goes by fits and starts, is not worth the reality it feeds upon.
Whetstone.
I’d put the price on everything,—trees, fences, houses, the baby’s rattle, and in its first primer a price-list of its expenses.
Bluegrass.
Hercules Whetstone, Mayor of Cornville, there are some things upon this magnificent star of ours that are not in the market,—things so high that you cannot reach and put a price upon them in the cold-blooded shambles of merchandise.
Whetstone.
There you go again, trying to throw star-dust in your benefactor’s eyes. Oh, why did I make you editor of my Cornville Eagle?
Bluegrass.
Because your Eagle was asleep, and I was the only one who could wake him up and make him soar into a higher circulation. He looked like a whipped buzzard that had dulled his talons upon old newspapers; but I put new life into him; and now that I have made you the proprietor of a newspaper which is a household word, and which will be in every scholar’s library at the close of human learning, you scoff at me. Such is glory in a commercial age! Columbus may discover, but the merchant Americus gives his name to two continents.