epers of intelligence feel, when they have got their nests ready
and begin to bill and coo in-doors. There are many things which every
fool knows, which people of sense do not know. First among these things
is, "What will you have for dinner?"--a question not to be answered by
detailed answers,--on the principle of the imaginary Barmacide feasts of
the cook-books,--but by the results of deep principles, which underlie,
indeed, the whole superficial strata of civilized life. Did not the army
of the Punjaub perish, as it retreated from Ghizni to Jelalabad, not
because the enemy's lances were strong, but because one day it did not
dine?

I am not going to tell the old story of that "sweet pretty girl" who,
after a week of legs of mutton, ordered a "leg of beef." I sympathize
with her from the bottom of my heart. Her sister will be married
to-morrow. To her I dedicate this paper, that she may know, not what she
shall order,--that is left to her own sweet will, less fettered now that
her life is rounded by her welding it upon its other half than it was
when she wandered in maiden meditation fancy-free,--not, I say, what she
shall order for her dinner and for Leander's, but the principle on which
the order is to be given.

"But, my dear Mr. Carter," says the blushing child, as she reads, "we
have got to be so dreadfully economical!"

Fairest of your sex, there was never one of your sex, since Eve finished
the apple, lest any should be wasted, nor of my sex, since Adam grimly
champed the parings, thinking he was "in for it," who should not be
economical. A just economy is the law of a luxurious life. "Dreadful
economy" is the principle which is now to be unfolded to you.

Economy in itself is one of the most agreeable of luxuries. This I need
not demonstrate. Everybody knows what good fun it is to make a bargain.
Economy becomes dreadful, only when some lightning-flash of truth shows
us that our painful frugality has been really the most lavish waste.

So Lois and I, for nine years, lived without a corkscrew. We would buy
busts and chromoliths with our money instead,--we would go to the White
Mountains, we would maintain an elegant aesthetic hospitality, as they do
in Paris, with the money we should save by doing without a corkscrew. So
I spoiled two sets of kitchen-forks by drawing corks with them, I broke
the necks of legions of bottles for which Mr. Tarr would have credited
me two cents each, and many times damaged, eve