Dollars, damn!

Look how Herman Melville likes to alliterate the "d" in dollars: with damn and Devil; with diplomas; with derived and ditties:

Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. --Herman Melville, 1851 letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Never mind, sir, never mind, sir; though rogues sometimes be gentlemanly; gentlemen that are gentlemen never go abroad without their diplomas. Their diplomas are their friends; and their only friends are their dollars; you have a purse-full of friends."  --Melville's Pierre, 1852

Now, the dollars derived from his ditties, these Pierre had always invested in cigars; so that the puffs which indirectly brought him his dollars were again returned, but as perfumed puffs; perfumed with the sweet leaf of Havanna.  --Pierre

Compare the examples above to this, the revised book version of the prairie dialogue that originally appeared in the August 1852 installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border, without any reference to dollars, dealing, or dens:

Let us have a fling at the world,—the poor dollar-dealing sinners, cooped up in their great dens—" --Scenes and Adventures in the Army

Woo hoo!

Elsewhere in the original magazine version our Captain of U. S. Dragoons has been thinking of dollars--and in connection with writing and publishing, as the following passage shows:

" What is written, may always chance to be printed, if not read: how charming then to the busy denizens of the world, whose very brains have received an artificial mould, to read such incident! Now if I could only introduce the word 'dollar,' — good heavens! it was never heard here before! 

--July 1852, Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army

Don't think Melville only ever speaks of plural dollars:

 And who will refuse, what Turk or Dyak even, his own little dollar for sweet charity's sake?  --The Confidence-Man

Or that our Captain of U. S. Dragoons only employs the singular dollar:

Imaginary Friend. — You are wandering again. What could have caused that strange circle in the grass there? — it is forty feet across, and, sure enough, it is of the rank sun-flower.

"Why, my friend, if you were imaginative you could people it with the fairies which have been frightened from the continent by the clink of gold, and have here found refuge—pretty far too from the sound of dollars."  -- June 1851 installment and Scenes and Adventures

For further consideration of that passage on dollar-dealers which appears only in the book version, see previous Dragooned posts on

• dollar-dealing sinners as the Duyckincks
• Den Koopman
• Flings at the World