able citizen the other day, "when
one sees the way in which people live and ladies dress." We thought
there was a great deal of truth in what the old gentleman said. Houses
at from five hundred to a thousand dollars rent, brocades at three
dollars a yard, bonnets at twenty, and shawls, and cloaks, &c., from
fifty dollars up, are enough to embarrass any community that indulges in
such extravagances as Americans do. For it is not only the families of
realized wealth, who could afford it, that spend money in this way, but
those who are yet laboring to make a fortune, and who, by the chances of
trade, may fail of this desirable result. Everybody wishes to live,
now-a-days, as if already rich. The wives and daughters of men, not
worth two thousand a-year, dress as rich nearly as those of men worth
ten or twenty thousand. The young, too, begin where their parents left
off. Extravagance, in a word, is piled on extravagance, till

"Alps o'er Alps arise."

The folly of this is apparent. The sums thus lavished go for mere show,
and neither refine the mind nor improve the heart. They gratify vanity,
that is all. By the practice of a wise economy, most families might, in
time, entitle themselves to such luxuries; and then indulgence in them
would not be so reprehensible. If there are two men, each making a clear
two thousand a-year, and one lays by a thousand at interest, while the
other spends his entire income, the first will have acquired a fortune
in sixteen years, sufficient to yield him an income equal to his
accustomed expenses, while the other will be as poor as when he started
in life. And so of larger sums. In fine, any man, by living on half of
what he annually makes, be it more or less, can, before he is forty,
acquire enough, and have it invested in good securities, to live for the
rest of his life in the style in which he has been living all along. Yet
how few do it! But what prevents? Extravagance! extravagance! and again
extravagance!

_Wives and carpets._--In the selection of a carpet, you should always
prefer one with small figures, for the two webs, of which the fabric
consists, are always more closely interwoven than in carpeting where
large figures are wrought. "There is a good deal of true philosophy in
this," says one, "that will apply to matters widely different from the
selection of carpets. A man commits a sad mistake when he selects a wife
that cuts too large a figure on the green carpet of life--in o