Compared with the Fantaisian connection, the whole commerce of the world
appeared to the Vraibleusians a retail business. All other customers
were neglected or discarded, and each individual seemed to concentrate
his resources to supply the wants of a country where they dance by
moonlight, live on fruit, and sleep on flowers. At length the first
fleet of five hundred sail, laden with wonderful specimens of
Vraibleusian mechanism, and innumerable bales of Vraibleusian
manufactures; articles raw and refined, goods dry and damp, wholesale
and retail; silks and woollen cloths; cottons, cutlery, and camlets;
flannels and ladies' albums; under waistcoats, kid gloves, engravings,
coats, cloaks, and ottomans; lamps and looking-glasses; sofas, round
tables, equipages, and scent-bottles; fans and tissue-flowers;
porcelain, poetry, novels, newspapers, and cookery books; bear's-grease,
blue pills, and bijouterie; arms, beards, poodles, pages, mustachios,
court-guides, and bon-bons; music, pictures, ladies' maids, scrapbooks,
buckles, boxing-gloves, guitars, and snuff-boxes; together with a
company of opera-singers, a band of comedians, a popular preacher, some
quacks, lecturers, artists, and literary gentlemen, principally
sketch-book men, quitted, one day, with a favourable wind, and amid the
exultation of the inhabitants, the port of Hubbabub!
When his Excellency Prince Popanilla heard of the contents of this
stupendous cargo, notwithstanding his implicit confidence in the
superior genius and useful knowledge of the Vraibleusians, he could not
refrain from expressing a doubt whether, in the present undeveloped
state of his native land, any returns could be made proportionate to so
curious and elaborate an importation; but whenever he ventured to
intimate his opinion to any of the most commercial nation in the world
he was only listened to with an incredulous smile which seemed to pity
his inexperience, or told, with an air of profound self-complacency,
that in Fantaisie 'there must be great resources.
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