been once made, the servant may calculate his chances of solvency by working the traditional question in arithmetic as to the time that it will take a frog to get out of a well who climbs two feet upwards every day, and falls three feet downwards every night, applying the answer to his own case.
It would, moreover, be erroneous to suppose that the truck system affects only the parties who are immediately concerned in it. For instance, a shoemaker brought home to my husband a pair of boots that he had ordered, and asked a sovereign for them, and when the price was objected to as being unreasonably high the shoemaker acknowledged that it was so, but said that he felt justified in asking it ever since learning that the same kind of boots with which he supplied a store at fifteen shillings the pair, were there retailed at the price of a pound. The shoemaker had gained his information by doing harvest work for the storekeeper and receiving, in part payment of it, a pair of these identical boots, which, when thus returned to their manufacturer in the form of wages, were considered to represent five shillings more than the sum at which he himself had originally valued them.
I often thought that there was a strong likeness between a system of truck and slavery, and one family feature, common to both, may certainly be found in the manner in which each is softened or made worse according to the circumstances and disposition of individual masters. We knew one who, so far from enriching himself at the expense of his men, supplied them with flour, when it was dear, at a lower cost than its real value; but benevolence of this kind, in the small thanks that it re-
