Page:Whyte-Melville--Bones and I.djvu/117

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GOLD FOR SILVER.
109

Africa to teach the public this strange rate of exchange. In Europe, Asia, and America too, as far as it has yet been colonized, such one-sided bargains are made every day

Old lamps for new, kicks for halfpence—"Heads I win. Tails you lose"—such are the laws of equity by which man deals with his neighbour, and so the contest goes on, if, indeed, as Juvenal says, that can be called a contest—


"Ubi tu pulsas, ego vapulo tantum." [1]


The slave of the princess with the long name had passed more of her life in the palace than the streets, or she would not have found the magician's cry so strange: would have felt uncomfortably conscious that the day might come when she, too, would

  1. "If that's a fight indeed,
    Where you strike hard, and I stand still and bleed."