There were those in that day, as well as in our own, who tried to beat down the price of an article by depreciating its quality: "It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer; but when he hath gone his way, then he boasteth." Donald G. Mitchell, in his charming book, _My Farm at Edgewood_, has a chapter on "Dickering" which is, in effect, an elaboration of the proverb last quoted. "Sometime or other, if a man enter upon farm life--and it holds in almost every kind of life--there will come to him a necessity for bargaining. It is a part of the curse, I think, entailed upon mankind at the expulsion from Eden, that they should sweat at a bargain. * * * If I were to take the opinions of my excellent friends, the purchasers, for truth, I should be painfully conscious of having possessed the most mangy hogs, the most aged cows, the scrubbiest veal, and the most diseased and stunted growth of chestnuts and oaks with which a country-liver was ever afflicted. For a time, in the early period of my novitiate, I was not a little disturbed by these damaging statements; but have been relieved by learning on further experience that the urgence of such lively falsehoods is only an ingenious mercenary device for the sharpening of a bargain." II.--EPIGRAMMATIC SAYINGS FROM OTHER SOURCES. The epigrammatic sayings of the Bible are not confined, as we have already seen, to the Book of Proverbs. We find them elsewhere. Hosea says of idolaters, "They have sown the wind and they shall reap the whirlwind." Micah declared of the mercenary prophets, "He that putteth not into their mouth, they even declare war against him." At the same time princes and judges are so corrupt, that "the best of them is as a briar; the most upright is sharper than a thorn hedge." Jeremiah charges against the people, "As a cage is full of birds, so are their houses of deceit." "Can the Ethiopian," he asks, "change his skin, or the leopard his spots?" and adds, "Then can ye also do right who are accustomed to do evil." This is equivalent to the proverb of another people: "Though you feed milk to a young snake, will it leave off its habit of creeping under the hedge?" "Can a maid forget her ornaments or a bride her attire?" asks Jeremiah; "yet my people have forgotten me days without number." "Yea, the stork in the heavens knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle and the crane and the swallow observe the time of their coming; but my people know not the judgment of the Lord." "As the partridge sitteth on eggs and hatcheth them not; so he that getteth riches and not by right, shall leave them in the middle of his days, and at the end shall be a fool."