lling or an hour that I could help on any impertinent
book,--any book that did not powerfully help me in the one remaining
interest of my one remaining life: a new nature and a new heart. No, not
I. No, not I any more.

CHAPTER X--CLIP-PROMISE

' . . . the promise made of none effect.'--_Paul_

Toward the end of the thirteenth century Edward the First, the English
Justinian, brought a select colony of artists from Italy to England and
gave them a commission to execute their best coinage for the English
Mint. Deft and skilful as those artists were, the work they turned out
was but rude and clumsy compared with some of the gold and silver and
copper coins of our day. The Florentine artists took a sheet of gold or
of silver and divided the sheet up with great scissors, and then they
hammered the cut-out pieces as only a Florentine hammerman could hammer
them. But, working with such tools, and working on such methods, those
goldsmiths and silversmiths, with all their art, found it impossible to
give an absolutely equal weight and worth to every piece of money that
they turned out. For one thing, their cut and hammered coins had no
carved rims round their edges as all our gold and silver and even copper
coinage now has. And, accordingly, the clever rogues of that day soon
discovered that it was far easier for them to take up a pair of shears
and to clip a sliver of silver off the rough rim of a shilling, or a
shaving of gold off a sovereign, than it was to take of their coats and
work a hard day's work. Till to clip the coin of the realm soon became
one of the easiest and most profitable kinds of crime. In the time of
Elizabeth a great improvement was made in the way of coining the public
money; but it was soon found that this had only made matters worse. For
now, side by side with a pure and unimpaired and full-valued currency,
and mingled up everywhere with it, there was the old, clipped, debased,
and far too light gold and silver money; till troubles arose in
connection with the coinage and circulation of the country that can only
be told by Macaulay's extraordinarily graphic pen. 'It may well be
doubted,' Macaulay says, in the twenty-first chapter of his _History of
England_, 'whether all the misery which has been inflicted on the English
nation in a quarter of a century by bad Kings, bad Ministers, bad
Parliaments, and bad Judges was equal to the misery caused in a single
year by bad crowns and b