“Yet, mendicant though he was, it would be a great mistake to suppose that he was not always a welcome guest. He slept in the best room, sat in the warmest nook by the fire, and had the best food set before him at the table. In the long winter evenings he helped the boys with their lessons, held yarn for the daughters, or escorted them to spinning matches and quiltings. In return for his miserable pittance and his board, the young student taught what would now be considered as the rudiments of an education. His daily labors were confined to teaching his scholars to read with a moderate degree of fluency, to write legibly, to spell with some regard for the rules of orthography, and to know as much of arithmetic as would enable them to calculate the interest on a debt, to keep the family accounts, and to make change in a shop. “Nor was this making change a simple matter. Fifty years ago the silver pieces which passed from hand to hand, under the name of small change, were largely made up of foreign coins. They had been in circulation long before the war for independence, had seen much service, and were none the better for the wear and tear they had sustained. “One of these pieces was known as the four-pence, but passed for six and a quarter cents if, as the result of long hoarding, the inscription was legible, and the stamp easy to make out; but when worn smooth—and the four-pence pieces generally were worn smooth and crossed—no one would take them for more than five cents. A larger coin was the nine-pence, which passed for twelve and a half cents. The pistareen was worth twenty cents. The picayune, a term rarely used north of Mason and Dixon’s line, went for six and a quarter cents. But the confusion was yet more increased by the language which merchants used to express the price of their goods. “The value of the gold pieces expressed in dollars was pretty much the same the country over. But the dollar, and the silver pieces regarded as fractions of a dollar, had no less than five different values. In New England and Virginia a merchant who spoke of a dollar was understood to mean six shillings, or one hundred and eight coppers; but the same merchant would, the moment he set foot in North Carolina or New York, be content with demanding ninety-six coppers, or eight shillings, as the equivalent of a dollar. Sixpence in Massachusetts meant eight and a third cents; a shilling meant sixteen and two-third cents; two-and-three pence was thirty-seven and a half cents; three shillings was fifty cents; four-and-six was seventy five cents; nine shillings was a dollar and a half.”