he
matter of wages. I picked up what I could under that head during
the afternoon. A man who hasn't had much experience, and doesn't
think, is apt to measure a nation's prosperity or lack of prosperity
by the mere size of the prevailing wages; if the wages be high, the
nation is prosperous; if low, it isn't. Which is an error. It
isn't what sum you get, it's how much you can buy with it, that's
the important thing; and it's that that tells whether your wages
are high in fact or only high in name. I could remember how it
was in the time of our great civil war in the nineteenth century.
In the North a carpenter got three dollars a day, gold valuation;
in the South he got fifty--payable in Confederate shinplasters
worth a dollar a bushel. In the North a suit of overalls cost
three dollars--a day's wages; in the South it cost seventy-five
--which was two days' wages. Other things were in proportion.
Consequently, wages were twice as high in the North as they were
in the South, because the one wage had that much more purchasing
power than the other had.

Yes, I made various acquaintances in the hamlet and a thing that
gratified me a good deal was to find our new coins in circulation
--lots of milrays, lots of mills, lots of cents, a good many nickels,
and some silver; all this among the artisans and commonalty
generally; yes, and even some gold--but that was at the bank,
that is to say, the goldsmith's. I dropped in there while Marco,
the son of Marco, was haggling with a shopkeeper over a quarter
of a pound of salt, and asked for change for a twenty-dollar gold
piece. They furnished it--that is, after they had chewed the piece,
and rung it on the counter, and tried acid on it, and asked me
where I got it, and who I was, and where I was from, and where
I was going to, and when I expected to get there, and perhaps
a couple of hundred more questions; and when they got aground,
I went right on and furnished them a lot of information voluntarily;
told them I owned a dog, and his name was Watch, and my first wife
was a Free Will Baptist, and her grandfather was a Prohibitionist,
and I used to know a man who had two thumbs on each hand and a wart
on the inside of his upper lip, and died in the hope of a glorious
resurrection, and so on, and so on, and so on, till even that
hungry village questioner began to look satisfied, and also a shade
put out; but he had to respect a man of my financial strength,
and so he didn't