And there blazes in my memory like a comet the day when she came home from Hollins Market complaining with strange and bitter indignation that the fishmongers there—including old Harris, her favorite—had begun to sell shad roe. Hitherto, stretching back to the first settlement of Baltimore Town, they had always thrown it in with the fish. Worse, she reported that they had now entered upon an illegal combination to lift the price of the standard shad of twenty inches—enough for the average family, and to spare—from forty cents to half a dollar. When my father came home for lunch and heard the incredible news, he predicted formally that the Republic would never survive the Nineteenth Century.” H. L. M., “The Baltimore of the Eighties”
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