with quack medicines, bought cheap, hoping thereby to fend
off the doctor's bill. Some women seem to be pursued by an evil demon
of economy, which, like an _ignis fatuus_ in a bog, delights
constantly to tumble them over into the mire of expense. They are
dismayed at the quantity of sugar in the recipe for preserves, leave
out a quarter, and the whole ferments and is spoiled. They cannot by
any means be induced at any one time to buy enough silk to make a
dress, and the dress finally, after many convulsions and alterations,
must be thrown by altogether as too scanty. They get poor needles,
poor thread, poor sugar, poor raisins, poor tea, poor coal. One
wonders, in looking at their blackened, smouldering grates in a
freezing day, what the fire is there at all for,--it certainly warms
nobody. The only thing they seem likely to be lavish in is funeral
expenses, which come in the wake of leaky shoes and imperfect
clothing. These funeral expenses at last swallow all, since nobody can
dispute an undertaker's bill. One pities these joyless beings.
Economy, instead of a rational act of the judgment, is a morbid
monomania, eating the pleasure out of life, and haunting them to the
grave.

"Some people's ideas of economy seem to run simply in the line of
eating. Their flour is of an extra brand, their meat the first cut;
the delicacies of every season, in their dearest stages, come home to
their table with an apologetic smile,--'It was scandalously dear, my
love, but I thought we must just treat ourselves.' And yet these
people cannot afford to buy books, and pictures they regard as an
unthought-of extravagance. Trudging home with fifty dollars' worth of
delicacies on his arm, Smith meets Jones, who is exulting with a bag
of crackers under one arm and a choice little bit of an oil painting
under the other, which he thinks a bargain at fifty dollars. '_I_
can't afford to buy pictures,' Smith says to his spouse, 'and I don't
know how Jones and his wife manage.' Jones and his wife will live on
bread and milk for a month, and she will turn her best gown the third
time, but they will have their picture, and they are happy. Jones's
picture remains, and Smith's fifty dollars' worth of oysters and
canned fruit to-morrow will be gone forever. Of all modes of spending
money, the swallowing of expensive dainties brings the least return.
There is one step lower than this,--the consuming of luxuries that are
injurious to the health. If all th