husband who never fails to settle his wife's bills, so long as he may
raise a row about them till his wife cries and looks like an
expensive luxury which only a really successful man could afford.
Then he subsides until the first of the next month.

II

CHRONICLES OF A CRAFTSMAN

Mrs. Budlong's campaign was undertaken with the same farsightedness
as a magazine editor's. On or about the Fourth of July she began to
worry and plan. By the second week in August she had her tatting
well under way. By the middle of September she was getting in her
embroidered doilies. The earliest frost rarely surprised her with
her quilts untufted. And when the first snow flew, her sachet bags
were all stuffed and smelly.

She was very feminine in her sense of the value of her own time. At
missionary meetings she would shed tears over the pathetic pictures
of Oriental women who spent a year weaving a rug which would sell for
a paltry hundred dollars and last a mere century or two. Then she
would cheerfully devote fifteen days of incessant stitching at
something she carried round in a sort of drumhead. At the end of
that time she would have completed a more or less intolerable piece
of colored fabric which she called a "drape" or a "throw." It could
not be duplicated at a shop for less than $1.75, and it would wash
perhaps three times.

Mr. Budlong once figured that if sweat-shop proprietors paid wages at
the scale Mrs. Budlong established for herself, all the seamstresses
and seamsters would curl up round their machines and die of
starvation the first week. But he never told Mrs. Budlong this.
Fancy stitching did not earn much, but it did not cost much; and it
kept her mysteriously contented. She was stitching herself to her
own home all the time.

The Christmas presents Mrs. Budlong made herself were not all a
matter of needle and thread. Not at all! One year she turned her
sewing room into a smithy. She gave Mr. and Mrs. Doctor Tisnower the
loveliest hand-hammered brass coal scuttle that ever was seen--and
with a purple ribbon tied to its tail. They kept flowers in it
several summers, till one cruel winter a new servant put coal in it
and completely scuttled it.

The same year she gave Mrs. ex-Mayor Cinnamon a hammered brass
version of a C. D. Gibson drawing. The lady and gentleman looked as
if they had broken out with a combination of yellow fever and
smallpox, or suffered from enlarged pores or something.