Don’t think I’m going to perpetrate a monetary article. No fancy that way! I ignore anything approaching to a stock! I refer now to that omnipresent, omniscient, ubiquitous, express-train little victim so baptized in the dry-goods stores, who hears nothing but the everlasting word cash dinned in his juvenile ears from matin to vespers; whose dangerous duty it is to rush through a crowd of expectant and impatient feminines, without suffering his jacket buttons to become too intimately acquainted with the fringes of their shawls, or the laces of their mantillas! and to dodge so dexterously as not to knock down, crush under foot, or otherwise damage the string of juveniles that said women are bound to place as obstructions in said “Cash’s” way!
1. The boy employed in stores to fetch and carry change.
See him double, and turn, and twist, like a rabbit in a wood, while that word of command flies from one clerk’s lip to another. Poor, demented little Cash! Where is your anxious maternal? Who finds you in patience and shoe leather? Does your pillow ever suggest anything to your weary brain but pillar-less quarters, and crossed sixpences, and faded bank bills? When do you find time, you poor little victim, to comb your hair, digest your victuals, and say your catechism? Do you ever look back with a sigh to the days of peppermints, peanuts and pinafores? Or forward, in the dim distance, to a vision of a long-tailed coat, a high standing dickey, and no more “Cash,” save in your pantaloons’ pocket? Don’t you ever catch yourself wishing that a certain rib of Adam’s had never been subtracted from his paradisiacal side?
173Poor, miserable little Cash! you have my everlasting sympathy! I should go shopping twenty times, where I now go once, didn’t it harrow up my feelings, to see you driven on so, like a locomotive! “Here’s hoping” you may soon be made sensible of more than one meaning to word CHANGE!
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