"I am not ignorant of your country, pedler, and of the ways of its
people; but it is not me that you are to satisfy. Answer to the
gentlemen around, if it is not a difficult matter for you to get water
to boil at all during the winter months."
"Why, to say the truth, lawyer, when coal is scarce and high in the
market, heat is very hard to come. Now, I guess the ware I brought out
last season was made under those circumstances; but I have a lot on hand
now, which will be here in a day or two, which I should like to trade to
the colonel, and I guess I may venture to say, all the hot water in the
country won't melt the solder off."
"I tell you what, pedler, we are more likely to put you in hot water
than try any more of your ware in that way. But where's your
plunder?--let us see this fine lot of notions you speak of"--was the
speech of the colonel already so much referred to, and whose coffee-pot
bottom furnished so broad a foundation for the trial. He was a wild and
roving person, to whom the tavern, and the racecourse, and the cockpit,
from his very boyhood up, had been as the breath of life, and with whom
the chance of mischief was never willingly foregone.
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