The driver threw the card in the gutter: "Never heard of you before," said the driver, "and don't want to hear of you again. But I want my fare--and I must have it!" The great banker was in haste. "I have only an order for a million," he said. "Give me change;" and he proffered a "coupon" for fifty thousand francs.
The conductor stared, and the passengers set up a horselaugh. Just then an "Agent de Change" came by, and Baron Rothschild borrowed of him the six sous.
The driver was now seized with a kind of remorseful respect; and turning to the Money-King, he said:
"If you want ten francs, Sir, I don't mind lending them to you on my own account!"
ONE of the best chapters in "Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures," is where that amiable and greatly abused angel reproaches her inhuman spouse with loaning the family umbrella:
"Ah! that's the third umbrella gone since Christmas! What were you to do? Why, let him go home in the rain. I don't think there was any thing about _him_ that would spoil. Take cold, indeed! He does not look like one o' the sort to take cold. He'd better taken cold, than our only umbrella. Do you hear the rain, Caudle? I say do you _hear the rain_? Do you hear it against the windows? Nonsense; you can't be asleep with such a shower as that. Do you _hear_ it, I say? Oh, you _do_ hear it, do you? Well, that's a pretty flood, I think, to last six weeks, and no stirring all the time out of the house. Poh! don't think to fool _me_, Caudle: _he_ return the umbrella! As if any body ever _did_ return an umbrella! There--do you hear it? Worse and worse! Cats and dogs for six weeks--always six weeks--and no umbrella!
"I should like to know how the children are to go to school, to-morrow. They shan't go through _such_ weather, _that_ I'm determined. No; they shall stay at home, and never learn anything, sooner than go and get wet. And when they grow up, I wonder who they'll have to thank for knowing nothing. People who can't feel for their children ought never to _be_ fathers.
"But _I_ know why you lent the umbrella--_I_ know very well. I was going out to tea to mother's, to-morrow;--you _knew_ that very well; and you did it on purpose. Don't tell me; _I_ know: you don't want me to go, and take every mean advantage to hinder me. But don't you think it, Caudle. No; if it comes down in buckets-full, I'll go all the more: I will; and what's more, I'll walk every step of the way; and you know that will give me my death," &c., &c., &c.
