“Nor was this making change a simple matter. Fifty years ago the silver pieces which passed from hand to hand, under the name of small change, were largely made up of foreign coins. They had been in circulation long before the war for independence, had seen much service, and were none the better for the wear and tear they had sustained.
“One of these pieces was known as the four-pence, but passed for six and a quarter cents if, as the result of long hoarding, the inscription was legible, and the stamp easy to make out; but when worn smooth—and the four-pence pieces generally were worn smooth and crossed—no one would take them for more than five cents. A larger coin was the nine-pence, which passed for twelve and a half cents. The pistareen was worth twenty cents. The picayune, a term rarely used north of Mason and Dixon’s line, went for six and a quarter cents. But the confusion was yet more increased by the language which merchants used to express the price of their goods.
“The value of the gold pieces expressed in dollars was pretty much the same the country over. But the dollar, and the silver pieces regarded as fractions of a dollar, had no less than five different values. In New England and Virginia a merchant who spoke of a dollar was understood to mean six shillings, or one hundred and eight coppers; but the same merchant would, the moment he set foot in North Carolina or New York, be content with demanding ninety-six coppers, or eight shillings, as the equivalent of a dollar. Sixpence in Massachusetts meant eight and a third cents; a shilling meant sixteen and two-third cents; two-and-three pence was thirty-seven and a half cents; three shillings was fifty cents; four-and-six was seventy five cents; nine shillings was a dollar and a half.”
About all these to us strange coins and values the schoolmaster was expected to know, and to be able also to instruct his scholars. He filled, therefore, a very important place in the life of the village, as well as in the experience of the boys under his instruction. Nowhere to-day can you find in village schoolmaster, district or town school teacher, superintendent of instruction, or learned professor, a figure that fills out and continues just the portrait of the typical pedagogue of a generation or more ago.