Page:Tales in Political Economy by Millicent Garrett Fawcett.djvu/63

 women. Captain Adam was very confident that the latter would be able to produce a cloth from the plantain fibre very superior to any that had been made with the rough machinery and unskilled labour of the first inhabitants of Isle Pleasant; and he also was very certain that the engineers would be very valuable additions to the community. On arriving at the island he found that great progress had been made in a variety of ways during his absence. The most striking change that had been made was the introduction of the use of money. As the way in which it had been introduced was rather curious, it shall be described.

The Pleasant people, as they liked to call themselves, had long been grumbling at the inconvenience of carrying out a great number of exchanges by means of barter; the man who had a basket of plantains to dispose of, and who wished to obtain in exchange a knitted jersey, would find perhaps that Mrs. Collins, the woman who was the best hand at making these jerseys, had more plantains already in stock than she expected to want for the next four months, and