at this milliner's bill!'

"'I assure you,' says Mrs. Jones, 'we haven't got any more than the
Stebbinses, nor so much.'

"'Don't you know that the Stebbinses are worth five times as much as
ever I was?'

"No, Mrs. Jones did not know it: how should she, when her husband
makes it a rule never to speak of his business to her, and she has not
the remotest idea of his income?

"Thus multitudes of good, conscientious women and girls are
extravagant from pure ignorance. The male provider allows bills to be
run up in his name, and they have no earthly means of judging whether
they are spending too much or too little, except the semi-annual
hurricane which attends the coming in of these bills.

"The first essential in the practice of economy is a knowledge of
one's income, and the man who refuses to accord to his wife and
children this information has never any right to accuse them of
extravagance, because he himself deprives them of that standard of
comparison which is an indispensable requisite in economy. As early as
possible in the education of children, they should pass from that
state of irresponsible waiting to be provided for by parents, and be
trusted with the spending of some fixed allowance, that they may learn
prices and values, and have some notion of what money is actually
worth and what it will bring. The simple fact of the possession of a
fixed and definite income often suddenly transforms a giddy,
extravagant girl into a care-taking, prudent little woman. Her
allowance is her own; she begins to plan upon it,--to add, subtract,
multiply, divide, and do numberless sums in her little head. She no
longer buys everything she fancies; she deliberates, weighs, compares.
And now there is room for self-denial and generosity to come in. She
can do without this article; she can furbish up some older possession
to do duty a little longer, and give this money to some friend poorer
than she; and ten to one the girl whose bills last year were four or
five hundred finds herself bringing through this year creditably on a
hundred and fifty. To be sure, she goes without numerous things which
she used to have. From the standpoint of a fixed income she sees that
these are impossible, and no more wants them than the green cheese of
the moon. She learns to make her own taste and skill take the place of
expensive purchases. She refits her hats and bonnets, retrims her
dresses, and in a thousand busy, earnest, happy little ways