Things certainly moved ! Of course, the gaols were full
; but a new cry had gone out for " sunlight in every cell," and so the gaols were big, and bright with jazz music pouring out of every window, and with burglars telling the warden when to buy copper and when to drop nickel.
Buy ! Soon you didn't need to buy ! You just picked things up ! One man—I knew him—picked up a quarter of a mine in Northern British Columbia for a song,—and he could sing better. Another picked up twenty shares in a pearl fishery in Switzerland ; another man got for practically nothing, or less, forty thirty-fifths of an ice plant in Greenland. There was something coining to everybody, and everybody got what was coming to him.
All this made a great intellectual brightening. Talk became so interesting ! Everybody else's mind seemed so bright, what with nickel and copper and Kansas hogs on the hod, and Rhodesian cotton by the bale ; and all going up ! Every dinner party was a rattle of brilliant repartee made up of equal parts of arithmetic, geography, hogography and market biography ; or of softer under- tones, in whispered asides, such as " Hogs are up in Kansas, darling, by a cent and a half ! " " Oh, Fred, isn't that lovely ! " -" Yes, sweetheart, and selected high quarters are up higher still. • They touched 25 cents." !` Oh, Fred, what a lot it will mean to mother 1 '!
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