Year: 1875




We know a very industrious and ami
able little housewife out west who has
taste for darning stockings. She can put
as neat a patch upon a stocking as ever
you saw, the threads of cotton as regular
as fish-netting, and as straight as an "only
direct railway route :" and the whole 50
smoothly done that you hardly know
which is the original and which the darn.
Indeed, her ijovial neighbor who liyesjust
across the alley says those darns never
wear out. She says that Mrs. Hamilton's
stockings are like the human system
the material is renewed every seven years.
And the neighbor, being in good circum-
stances, and having nothing else to do,
has calculated the total expense of mend
ing these stockings after the first thor
ough overhauling, as expressed in cotton,
needles, and candles, and finds that it
would have kept Mrs. HamiltOns family
i'll the best balbrigans or British hose, in
stead of the inferior quality which she
had bought for their cheapness. In this
estimate no account was taken of the
time employed in the mending. Mrs.
Hamilton has said that her labor was her
capital, and it hardly seemed fair to count
that in. Our informant says, however,
that her Joe heard Clint Hamilton say
the other day that, somehow, that last
batch of doughnuts wouldn't go down.


We know another worthy and we'll
meaning young woman in New York,
whose limited salary as private tutor has
for several years supported a chiyalrous
old soldier of the last two wars, whom
the last one left impoverished and unpen-
stoned in Alabama. 1t was her custom
heaven knows she thought it her duty
to walk up to her work, twenty blocks,
through the slush and snow of last Win
ter, in order to save the fares by the
street cars. She would, perhaps, have
reasoned, between coughs, that health
was capital.


People whose resources are small fire.
quently make the mistake of supposing
that what is of immediate and market
able value is of more importance than
health or education, and they begin
course of economy by cutting away their
pleasures; money spent in recreation
comes to be regarded as a dead waste.
While Thomas concert or q day up the
Hudson would let in enough music or
sunshine to drive away the whimseys
and the doctor for a month to come, this
mistaken notion of economy cuts off the
only way of escape from the grindstone
and pill box. The first necessity of
business man is diversion; and 50 long as
it does not become laborious, the more
absorbing his diversion, the better. Be
tween the utility of the beautiful and
the beautiful of the useful there is no
room to institute comparison.


In some people economy takes the form
of investment for income. These are the
support of the mock-auction shop and
the secondhand bookstore. Mrs Toodles,
with her door-plate, has congener in
the seedy young bibliophile who thinks
he has found bargain in the "annual
report of the deaf and dumb insane asy-
lum for blind inebriates," or the " History
of the Christian missions among the bare
legged Indians"


Other people cling to an old garment
as to an old friend; and after it has be-
come as shiny as a suit of medieval arm
or, rebind and patch, and clean it an ex-
pensc greatly disproportionate to its
worth This is only another and a
longer road to prodigality.


After all, the principle of economy is |
not 80 much selt-sacrifice as discretion,
and a little bit of good sense will often /.
eyade the necessity Of heroism.