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Show IIAYTIEN GREENBACKS. As 1. stepped ahore at Port-au-Prince I met an orange girl, and asked her the price of her fruit per dozen. She replied "forty dollars." I made up my mind that that unfortunate young woman bad escaped from a lunatic lun-atic asylum, and I noticed a wikl look about her eyes as I passed on without saying anything. But when a miserable, miser-able, beggarly native took a message across the street for me, and demanded only r!00, I thought it time to remonstrate, remon-strate, and I refused to give the audacious auda-cious swindler anything, expressing my opinion of him in English, which he didn't understand. But when I saw a straw hat marked $2,000, a light began to dawn upon me. I held up a five-dollar gold piece, and the shopkeeper shop-keeper took it, gave me the hat, and then shoveled out about a bushel of dirty little bits of paper, which he said was my "change." Then it was explained ex-plained to me that the currency of the country was a paper money so depreciated depre-ciated that 500 or 000 gourdes, or dollars, dol-lars, of it are equal only to ODe dollar in hard money. The island was flooded with it, and it has been so nearly worthless at one time that $10,-UOU $10,-UOU in paper was eouivalent to one dollar in gold. After! had stuffed all my pockets and my hat with the change, I immediately went back and paid the ill-used messenger his $400, with a few hundreds thrown in for having called him names in a language he didn't understand. Xcw York Standard. |