et and a lace
shawl, and take her yearly to Washington to show off her beauty in
ball-dresses, who yet will not let her pay wages which will command any
but the poorest and most inefficient domestic service. The woman is worn
out, her life made a desert by exhaustion consequent on a futile attempt
to keep up a showy establishment with only half the hands needed for the
purpose. Another family will give brilliant parties, have a gay season
every year at the first hotels at Newport, and not be able to afford the
wife a fire in her chamber in midwinter, or the servants enough food to
keep them from constantly deserting. The damp, mouldy, dingy
cellar-kitchen, the cold, windy, desolate attic, devoid of any comfort,
where the domestics are doomed to pass their whole time, are witnesses
to what such families consider economy. Economy in the view of some is
undisguised slipshod slovenliness in the home-circle for the sake of
fine clothes to be shown abroad; it is undisguised hard selfishness to
servants and dependents, counting their every approach to comfort a
needless waste,--grudging the Roman-Catholic cook her cup of tea at
dinner on Friday, when she must not eat meat,--and murmuring that a
cracked, second-hand looking-glass must be got for the servants' room:
what business have they to want to know how they look?

"Some families will employ the cheapest physician, without regard to his
ability to kill or cure; some will treat diseases in their incipiency
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 n