nary legal services--I have spent
several hundred dollars' worth of my own time trying to figure it all
out. But this is nothing to the expense incident to the straightening of
children's teeth.

When I was a child teeth seemed to take care of themselves, but my boy
and girls were all obliged to spend several years with their small
mouths full of plates, wires and elastic bands. In each case the cost
was from eighteen hundred to two thousand dollars. A friend of mine with
a large family was compelled to lay out during the tooth-growing period
of his offspring over five thousand dollars a year for several years.
Their teeth are not straight at that.

Then, semioccasionally, weird cures arise and seize hold of the female
imagination and send our wives and daughters scurrying to the parlors of
fashionable specialists, who prescribe long periods of rest at expensive
hotels--a room in one's own house will not do--and strange diets of mush
and hot water, with periodical search parties, lighted by electricity,
through the alimentary canal.

One distinguished medico's discovery of the terra incognita of the
stomach has netted him, I am sure, a princely fortune. There seems to be
something peculiarly fascinating about the human interior. One of our
acquaintances became so interested in hers that she issued engraved
invitations for a fashionable party at which her pet doctor delivered a
lecture on the gastro-intestinal tract. All this comes high, and I have
not ventured to include the cost of such extravagances in my budget,
though my wife has taken cures six times in the last ten years, either
at home or abroad.

And who can prophesy the cost of the annual spring jaunt to Europe? I
have estimated it at thirty-five hundred dollars; but, frankly, I never
get off with any such trifling sum. Our passage alone costs us from
seven hundred to a thousand dollars, or even more and our ten-days'
motor trip--the invariable climax of the expedition rendered necessary
by the fatigue incident to shopping--at least five hundred dollars.

Our hotel bills in Paris, our taxicabs, theater tickets, and dinners at
expensive restaurants cost us at least a thousand dollars, without
estimating the total of those invariable purchases that are paid for out
of the letter of credit and not charged to my wife's regular allowance.
Even in Paris she will, without a thought, spend fifty dollars at
Reboux' for a simple spring hat--and this is not regarded