heir money.

EXTRA LEAVES

(iii) _On Money and League of Nations Currency_

In the course of this little tour of Europe I bought 1,000 francs and
4,000 liras, and 1,500 drachmas, 3,000 dinars, and the same number of
levas, some lei and 20,000 piastres, 7,000 Hungarian crowns and 32,000
Austrian crowns, 3,000 Czech crowns, 10,000 German marks, 15,000 odd
Polish marks, 500 Belgian francs, and some paper money of the
principality of Monaco.

You have to be somewhat of an arithmetician to think one week in
piastres and the next in dinars, and the next in crowns, and the next
in marks. You are always losing but you always think you are winning.
You afford pleasure to strangers whenever you go because you can be
robbed so easily and safely. In each country you can be robbed coming
in and robbed going out and generally robbed in between. You do not
mind very much, it is part of the legitimate expense of modern travel.

You accumulate great wads of paper. See the people of Vienna and
Warsaw, their inside pockets are all misshapen by the bulge of the
money. The pockets of an international traveller are worse. He holds
his unnegotiable accumulation of the money which is not worth changing
nor yet worth throwing away.

"How much do you expect to get for this?" said a Hungarian banker
surveying a bulky packet of Turkish piastres. I mentioned a likely sum.

"_Grande erreur_!" he exclaimed, and lifted his hands in horror. In
Budapest they were marketable only for a tenth of what I gave for them.

So the piastres remained together with provincial French notes and
small denominations of dinars and what-not, nominally worth something
somewhere, but in fact unsaleable.

The Germans have just now a very popular word for a _nouveau-riche_, it
is a _schieber_, one who exchanges. Getting your money changed is one
of the most wasteful processes for you and one of the most gainful for
him.

A certain man had 10 pounds which he exchanged for 450 francs. Then he
exchanged the francs for 600 lira; he journeyed by Fiume to Serbia and
changed again for 900 dinars. At Belgrade he bought 6,000 Hungarian
crowns. He carried the money to Budapest and then to Vienna, where he
had some luck and got 15,000 Austrian crowns. However, at Prague the
bankers said they did not encourage the sale of Austrian money as they
did not know what it was worth. He got 1,000 Czech crowns, which in
turn he changed to 10,000 Polish marks. He