"... there blazes in my memory like a comet the day when [my mother] came home from Hollins market complaining with bitter indignation that the fishmongers there—including old Harris, her favorite—has begun to *sell* shad roe. Hitherto... they had always thrown it in with the fish. Worse, she reported they had now entered upon an illegal combination to lift the price of the standard shad of twenty inches... from forty cents to half a dollar. When my father came home for lunch and heard this incredible news, he predicted formally that the Republic would never survive the Nineteenth Century."
—H.L. Mencken, 'The Baltimore of the Eighties' (1940)
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