“Oh for that, I expect I can fix ’em as well as ever them was, what you got in market.”

“You fix them?”

“Yes to be sure, why not?”

“I thought you were too fond of marbles.”

He gave me a keen glance, and said, “You don’t know I.—­When will you be wanting the chickens?”

He brought them at the time directed, extremely well “fixed,” and I often dealt with him afterwards.  When I paid him, he always thrust his hand into his breaches pocket, which I presume, as being the keep, was fortified more strongly than the dilapidated outworks, and drew from thence rather more dollars, half-dollars, levies, and fips, than his dirty little hand could well hold.  My curiosity was excited, and though I felt an involuntary disgust towards the young Jew, I repeatedly conversed with him.

“You are very rich, Nick,” I said to him one day, on his making an ostentatious display of change, as he called it; he sneered with a most unchildish expression of countenance, and replied, “I guess ’twould be a bad job for I, if that was all I’d got to shew.”

I asked him how he managed his business.  He told me that he bought eggs by the hundred, and lean chicken by the score, from the waggons that passed their door on the way to market; that he fatted the latter in coops he had made himself, and could easily double their price, and that his eggs answered well too, when he sold them out by the dozen.

“And do you give the money to your mother?”

“I expect not,” was the answer, with another sharp glance of his ugly blue eyes.

“What do you do with it.  Nick?”

His look said plainly, what is that to you? but he only answered, quaintly enough, “I takes care of it.”

How Nick got his first dollar is very doubtful; I was told that when he entered the village store, the person serving always called in another pair of eyes; but having obtained it, the spirit, activity, and industry, with which he caused it to increase and multiply, would have been delightful in one of Miss Edgeworth’s dear little clean bright-looking boys, who would have carried all he got to his mother; but in Nick it was detestable.  No human feeling seemed to warm his young heart, not even the love of self-indulgence, for he was not only ragged and dirty, but looked considerably more than half starved, and I doubt not his dinners and suppers half fed his fat chickens.

I by no means give this history of Nick, the chicken merchant, as an anecdote characteristic in all respects of America; the only part of the story which is so, is the independence of the little man, and is one instance out of a thousand, of the hard, dry, calculating character that is the result of it.  Probably Nick will be very rich; perhaps he will be President.  I once got so heartily scolded for saying, that I did not think all American citizens were equally eligible to that office, that I shall never again venture to doubt it.