Herbert Quick

“ Charlemagne, Napoleon, and a good many of the fellows who had everything coming their way, owed their successes to the Bottle Imp, and their failures to selling out too soon: got scared when they got a headache, or on the eve of battle, or something like that. It was owned in South Africa, and Barney Barnato and Cecil Rhodes both had it. That accounts for the way they got up in the world. Then the Bottle and Imp went to the Nob Hill millionaire who bought it for eighty dollars and sold it to Keawe the Kanaka for fifty. ”

“ There are too many small coins now for the interests of the people who depend on contribution boxes. The Sunday Schools will all be against it. And the street-car companies won't want the cent subdivided. Then it'll be hard to convince Joe Cannon; he's always looking for a nigger in the fence, and there is one here, you understand. But the mill's going to be coined, all the same!”
“But,” said I, “who will buy the diabolical thing for a mill. If Keawe and his wife had such trouble selling it for a centime, it will be impossible to dispose of it for a mill, absolutely impossible! ”

“ S. F. 41144 is going to be put through, and old J. D.'ll sell his Bottle, Imp and all. Price, one mill. When this grip epidemic started in, he got a touch of it, and I'll state that a sick man feels a little nervous with that Imp in stock. So they wired for me. It's going to be a fight all right!”
“Why, who will oppose the bill?” said I. “No one will know its object.”
“Lots of folks will oppose it,” said he. “Every association of clergymen in the country is liable to turn up fighting it tooth and nail. ”

“ They put it up at four centimes, and without Keawe's knowledge that she had anything to do with it, Keawe's wife got an old man to buy it, and she took it off his hands at three. The Kanaka soon found out that he was now carrying his eternal damnation in his wife's name, and he procured an old skipper or mate, or some such fellow in a state of intoxication, to buy it of her for two, on the agreement that he would take it again for one. Here they were, frittering away untold fortunes, each trying to go to perdition to save the other—it makes me tired! ”