"All this talk of yours isn't the least bit to the point. No one here seems to care about the high price of grain. By Jove, I couldn't get a mouthful of bread to-day! And how the drought keeps on! We've had a sort of famine for a year. Confound the officials anyhow, who are standing in with the bakers! 'Scratch my back and I'll scratch yours,' as the saying goes. So the public has to suffer for it and their jaws get a long vacation. Oh, if we only had those roaring blades that I found here when I first arrived from Asia! I tell you, that was life! If the flour sold wasn't equal to the very best, they used to go for those poor devil officials as if Jupiter himself was angry with them. I remember Safinius. In those days he used to live down by the old archway, when I was a boy. He was hot stuff! Wherever he went he used to make the ground smoke! But he was perfectly straight, a man to rely on, a friend to a friend, a chap with whom you could safely throw dice with your eyes shut. In the court-room, too, how he used to make things hum! And he didn't talk in figures either, but straight to the point, and when he was arguing his voice used to swell like a trumpet. How affable he was. In those days, I tell you, grain was as cheap as dirt. If you bought a loaf of bread for a penny, you couldn't eat it up, even if you hired another man to help you; whereas nowadays, I've seen bulls'-eyes that were bigger than the loaves. Dear, dear, every day things are getting worse! The town is growing backward like a calf's tail. And why do we have a mayor who's no good and who thinks more of a penny piece than of the lives of all of us? He has a soft snap in private, for he takes in more money in a day than most of us have in our whole fortunes. I know one source from which he got a thousand gold pieces. If we had any spunk he wouldn't be so stuck on himself. But our people are lions in private and foxes in public. As far as I'm concerned, I've already eaten up my wardrobe, and if this sort of a harvest keeps on I'll have to sell my shanties."
The thing had gone to a disgusting extreme when Trimalchio, sodden with drink, hit upon a new sort of exhibition, and had hornblowers brought into the dining-room. Then having been propped up on pillows, he sprawled himself out upon the lowest couch and said:
"Imagine that I am dead. Play a nice tune over me."
The hornblowers blew a funeral march; and one of them, the slave of the undertaker, who was really the most respectable man in the crowd, blew such a tremendous blast that he roused up the whole neighborhood. The police who were on duty in the vicinity, thinking that Trimalchio's house was on fire, suddenly broke down the door and rushed in with axes and water, as was their right. Seizing this very favorable opportunity, we gave Agamemnon the slip, and made our escape as hastily as though we were really fleeing from a conflagration.
The thoughts that come often unsought, and, as it were, drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have, and therefore should be secured, because they seldom return again.—Locke. (1632-1704.)
Little Glimpses of the 19th Century.
The Great Events in the History of the Last One Hundred Years, Assembled
so as to Present a Nutshell Record.
[Continued from page 433.]