usual prerogative of coining money, it may not be amiss to mention the few peculiar terms that are connected with the currency. A truly national coin is the Eagle, so called from the emblem of the republic, which it bears; it is of gold, and of the value of ten dollars; double eagles, as well as half and quarter eagles, are in existence, though rarely seen. The only other coin peculiar to the United States is the dime, a silver coin of the value of ten cents, and the half-dime, both also very generally known as ten cent pieces and five cent pieces. Copper-money is represented by cents. In Texas at least the words dime, bit, two bits, etc., are still exclusively heard in shops and stores. The Spanish silver coins, which were long current in some parts of the Union, have nearly all disappeared, and with them their local names, as the fip and the levy, coins representing six and a quarter, and twelve and a half cents, the former a contraction of five pence through the English fippence, the latter the scant remnant of eleven pence. "A fip's worth of dinner and a levy's worth of sleep," were the words of a loafer of Philadelphia, where the names remained longest in use. (J. C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches, I,, p. 58.) The sixteenth part of a dollar is, in like manner, still frequently called a picayune, in New Orleans. Since the war a few new coins, of the value of a few cents, have been issued, mainly of nickel, and hence often so called, constituting what is known to the laws a Fractional Currency, or copper and nickel tokens. As the United States have, since the war, had exclusively paper-money, the cant name given to it from the green color of the back, Greenbacks, has become universal. "The word Greenbacks has become entirely domesticated as a respectable and generic term for an all-pervading species of evil, than the presence of which nothing can be worse, except its absence." (I. N. Spenser, Eclectic Monthly.) The confederate notes bore, for the same reason, the name of Bluebacks, which was, however, soon exchanged for the slang term of shucks. Nor have the solid gold coins escaped entirely the contamination of slang. When the Hon. T. H. Benton, of Missouri, put his whole strength forward on the floor of Congress and through the press to introduce a gold currency, he accidentally called the latter mint-drops, with a slight attempt at a pun. The word, however, became popular, and for many years gold coins were very largely known as Benton's mint-drops, while the author of the phrase was called Old Bullion. TRADE OF ALL KINDS. "Fair weight, fair measure, fair speech." B. Franklin. IT cannot be denied that if the English are a nation of shopkeepers, and have never proved the truth of Napoleon's charge more fully than during the last years, the Americans are not unmindful of the same source of wealth, and shop-slang, as their British cousins call the terminology of the counting-house, forms no insignificant part of our peculiar speech. Much, however, is here also looked upon as American, that has long been in use as good or bad-English, and among these terms, wrongfully imputed to us, stands naturally foremost the Almighty Dollar. How often have English authors cast the unlucky word, first coined in its modern form by W. Irving in 1837, in his Creole Village, into our teeth, and tried to make the world believe that none buť Americans knew the "almighty" power of money! We hope they will recall the first lines of Ben Jonson's Epistle to the Countess of Holland, which read thus: "Whilst that for which all virtue now is sold, and substituting the dollar for the guinea, they may safely claim the authorship of the phrase. It may even be doubted whether the dollar is as powerful in America as gold is in England, although a sarcastic writer speaks severely of the "unrelenting and desperate onwardness of the great Yankee dollar-chase." (Putnam's Magazine, April, 1855.) It is certainly remarkable that, with all this veneration for the Dollar, the sign by which it is represented |