“Well! will you consent to pen the flocks and then lift one hurdle and take them as they come out, so many from each lot?”

“That I consent to, sir, and remain your debtor for life.”

“I can’t see it; I set my life a great deal higher than sheepskin.”

Mr. Winchester did not stop there, he forced a hundred pounds upon George.  “If you start in any business with an empty pocket you are a gone coon.”

So these two friends parted with mutual esteem, and George set to work by prudence and vigor to make the thousand pounds.

One thousand pounds!  This one is to have the woman he loves for a thousand pounds.  That sounds cheap.  Heaven upon earth for a thousand pounds.  What is a thousand pounds?  Nothing.  There are slippery men that gain this in a week by time bargains, trading on capital of round 0’s; others who net as much in an evening, and as honorably, by cards.  There are merchants who net twenty times this sum by a single operation.

“An operation?” inquires Belgravia.

This is an operation:  You send forth a man not given to drink and consequently chatter to Amsterdam, another not given to drink and chatter to New Orleans, another n. g. t. d. and c. to Bordeaux, Cadiz, Canton, Liverpool, Japan, and where not, all with secret instructions.  Then at an appointed day all the men n. g. t. d. and c. begin gradually, secretly, cannily, to buy up in all those places all the lac-dye or something of the kind that you and I thought there was about thirty pounds of in creation.  This done mercator raises the price of lac-dye or what not throughout Europe.  If he is greedy and raises it a halfpenny a pound, perhaps commerce revolts and invokes nature against so vast an oppression, and nature comes and crushes our speculator.  But if he be wise and puts on what mankind can bear, say three mites per pound, then he sells tons and tons at this fractional profit on each pound, and makes fourteen thousand pounds by lac-dye or the like of which you and I thought creation held thirty or at most thirty-two pounds.

These men are the warriors of commerce; but its smaller captains, watching the fluctuations of this or that market, can often turn a thousand pounds ere we could say J. R. Far more than a thousand pounds have been made in a year by selling pastry off a table in the Boulevards of Paris.

In matters practical a single idea is worth thousands.

This nation being always in a hurry paid four thousand pounds to a man to show them how to separate letter-stamps in a hurry.  “Punch the divisions full of little holes,” said he, and he held out his hand for the four thousand pounds; and now test his invention, tear one head from another in a hurry, and you will see that money sometimes goes cheaper than invention.

A single idea is sometimes worth a thousand pounds in a book, though books are by far the least lucrative channels ideas run in; Mr. Bradshaw’s duodecimo, to wit—­profit seven thousand pounds per annum.  A thousand pounds!  How many men have toiled for money all their lives, have met with success, yet never reached a thousand pounds.