shock of a thousand
freezing shower-baths, their first 'monetary sensation.'

But the men and women who work either with head or hands--who fight
their way--who plan to gain and plan to spend, so that the latter
shall counterbalance the former--who lie sleepless in their beds,
intent on how to make both ends meet--who are lucky and unlucky--who
travel the ups and the downs of life, here grasping fortunes, there
turning out the linings of penniless pockets: these are the people
whose whole lives are one long succession of monetary sensations.
Among them mainly is cultivated the art of looking at two sides of a
shilling. They know how to value half-crowns and sovereigns in calling
up the long arrear of hard-worked hours, which are, as it were, the
small-change of quarters' salaries and weeks' wages. How many strokes
of the steady-going pen are encircled in those bright yellow
disks--how many thumps of the ponderous hammer has it taken to produce
this handful of silver. Or on a larger scale--as the successful
speculator sweeps to himself the mass of notes and bills, all as good
as gold, for which he has set every penny of his worldly means upon
the stake, and feels with a thrill which makes him clutch the precious
paper, that had things not turned out as, thank Heaven! they have,
that then, and then!----He has had a tolerably vigorous monetary
sensation.

But the whole of the money-getting classes, and, to some extent, the
classes who merely spend what others got and gave them, can look very
well back upon a series of monetary sensations which have marked
epochs in their lives. Our remembrances of that kind are, of course,
most deeply engraved, and most clearly recollected, in the cases in
which we are working for ourselves, and have ourselves achieved steps
and triumphed over difficulties in life--each step and triumph marked
by a lengthening of the purse. But there are early monetary
impressions common to almost all the juvenile world, rich and poor--to
the children of the duke or of the mechanic, to the boy who has
obtained the price of a pony or a watch, and the boy who has been made
a present of what will buy him a twopenny story-book, or a twopenny
bun. Boys and girls commonly have poses--to adopt a phrase not known
south of the Tweed, where it must be explained, that to have a pose,
is to possess a little private and secret, or quasi-secret, hoard of
treasure. This pose frequently imparts the first monetary sensa