Word: peppercorn
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...Peppercorn for Rent. Vanderlyn cheerfully produced another string to his bow; he had brought back detailed perspective drawings of Versailles, which he now proposed to work up into an oil panorama. His admirers were so taken by this idea that they raised money to build Manhattan's first art museum building, specifically to house the painting. It was a neoclassic, circular structure, a few steps from City Hall, on ground rented from the city for one peppercorn a year. Vanderlyn's panorama occupied the whole upstairs, his smaller canvases, which he thought finer, were downstairs. Entrance fees were...
Readers will find here little confirmation of the notion that temperamentally the Japanese are suited to the English, the Chinese to Americans. To Madame Ichikawa, who claims the Japanese character "is like a peppercorn, small but hot," the English were the least compatible people she found. Students looked "just like asparagus cultivated under glass," so soft and pink that she thought they might be almost edible. Flat-heeled, brown-clad English women all looked like schoolteachers. Under the withering catechism of Author Walter De La Mare, Madame Ichikawa admitted that the only things good about England were "the policeman, cart...