Lovel, the sly satisfaction with which one pays the consideration, and pockets the article, affecting a cold indifference, while the hand is trembling with pleasure!” The bargaining match with Maggie, the Fairport fishwife, is one of the gems of the story. Mr. Charles Reade offers a racy pendant in his trafficking encounter between Christie Johnstone, the pride of Newhaven, and the four Irish merchants who have agreed to work together, and to make a show of competition, the better to keep the price down within bounds, but who are no match for woman’s wit and woman’s tongue, as exercised by Christie. The author of “Doctor Jacob” depicts in Herr Schmidt a rosy, round man, with eyes that were never in tune with his mouth; the former being sharp, Jewish, and speculative; the latter, supine, commercial, and conservative: “He made use of his eyes when he bought, and of his mouth when he sold, giving his customers to understand that he was the easiest going man in the world, only desirous of small profits, and by no means miserable if a gold watch or any other article went for half its value.” Canon Kingsley enlivens the adventures of “Hereward” with a certain Dick Hammerhand, the richest man in Walcheren, who tries to overreach the hero, and fails to his cost; one stage of the transaction taking this turn: “The less anxious the stranger seemed to buy, the more anxious grew Dick to sell; but he concealed his anxiety, and let the stranger turn away, thanking him for his drink,” but anon renewing the treaty with as much semblance of disregard as he could put on. The author of “The Gayworthys” works up a clever bit of homely chaffering between Mrs. Vorse and Widow Horke the strawberry-dealer. And we find ourselves between a couple of horse-dealers again in “Silas Marner:” “Bryce of course divined that Dunstan wanted to sell the horse, and Dunstan knew that he divined it (horse-dealing is only one of many human transactions carried on in this ingenious manner); and they both considered that the bargain was in its first stage, when Bryce replied ironically, [to the other’s boast of a recent high bid,] ‘I wonder at that now, I wonder you mean to keep him; for I never heard of a man who didn’t want to sell his horse, getting a bid of half as much again as the horse was worth,’” etc. Trust Bryce to boast of that horse, and of that bargain, so soon as he is gone his way, the horse his, and the bargain made. It must be a distorted type of human nature that resembles the discontented man of Theophrastus, who, after taking a great deal of pains to beat down the price of a slave, and after he has paid his money for him,—instead of boasting, breaks out into the grumble, “I am sure thou art good for nothing, or I should not have had thee so cheap.” A companion picture, in its way, but with the difference between an inveterate grumbler and an impenetrable oaf, is that by Plautus of a fool with an old grange to sell, of which property he advertises the singular