I have allowed for my food exactly one dollar a week and allow the same now. I go down to the Washington Market early in the morning. I revel in the sight of the fresh vegetables, of the flowers and fruits. The market-people know me now, and many a gift-flower I have brought back with me to my room, and several times a pot of herbs or spring bulbs; now and then a few sprays of parsley or thyme. These I look upon as my commission! Without leaving the market, I buy a loaf of bread for ten cents; a knuckle of veal, or a beef bone, a pound and a half of sausages, or a pound of salt pork, for fifteen cents; I vary my purchases from time to time that I may have variety. Ten cents for vegetables--I vary these, also, as much as possible; these, with a pound of rice, nine cents, a half a pound of butter, eighteen cents, and a quart of beans for another ten cents, give me satisfying combinations. When eggs are cheap I vary this diet with them, lettuce and bacon. I buy things that are cheapest in their season. In summer, I drop out all meat and substitute milk. I allow myself one pound of sugar a week; no tea, no coffee; the city water is the only thing of which I can have enough free. With what is left of my hundred cents,--for in my art it is the cents with which I reckon, not dollars,--I buy fruit in its season, a bit of cheese, sometimes even a Philadelphia squab! At times, they are cheaper than meat in the Market. In the season I can get one for ten cents. I have an extra treat when I buy that last, for the old man at the poultry stall, who draws the chickens and various fowl, is a model from the old Italian masters. An Italian himself, he speaks little English, wears a skull cap and, to my delight, looks like one of Fra Angelico's saints. I learn all this from the Metropolitan Museum, and apply it in the Washington Market! At times I haunt the fish stalls, select good sea food for a change, and am rewarded by the play of color on the zinc counters--the mottled green of live lobsters, the scarlet of boiled ones, the silver and rose of pompano, the pomegranate of salmon. I have stood by the half hour to watch the slow-moving turtles, the scuttling crabs in the tanks. I have good friends throughout the Market--men and women. They confide in me at times, like the cod-and-hake man, dealer in dried fish, who told me he had "a girl once down on Cape Cod". He seemed relieved by this confession. He was serving me at the time, and his two hundred or more pounds, his red face and his cordiality were delightful. My butter-egg-and-cheese man also confides to me that he is a commuter; has purchased a home on the instalment plan; has three children, and his wife runs a private laundry. What remains of the four dollars after the weekly bills are paid, I lay aside for clothes. I make my own shirt waists. It took me eleven months to earn a good skirt of brown Panama cloth; but it has lasted me four years.