The sheet was a blurred mass of indistinct figures and lines. I could not make out a word. Thoroughly alarmed I hurried back to my room. There deciding to wait until after the lunch-hour before consulting an oculist, I dropped down on the bed and buried my head in the pillow, determined not to give way to tears. The arrival of the expressman with Alice’s trunk aroused me. It was nearly five o’clock and my sight had become normal. That evening when Alice came from work she found our little table set for our first meal and our dinner ready to take up. “You’ll have to get out the knife you brought from home,” I explained after her first gust of enthusiasm had subsided. “Sixty cents seemed about all we could spare this week for kitchen and dining-room furnishings.” “Sixty cents!” she cried. “I was just thinking these forks and spoons the real thing—things you brought from home.” “Two and a half cents each,” was my reply as I set the pan of rice in the centre of the table. “For the present we’ll have to serve ourselves directly from the cooking utensils.” “It will save dish-washing,” she approved, as she took a chop from the pie-plate on which it had been broiled. “But where is the soup?” “Soup! You don’t mean that you expect both soup and meat for the same dinner?” “Then why soup plates?” Squaring my shoulders I sat up very proud. “You can eat cereals out of a soup-plate, you can drink soup, when we have it, out of a soup-plate. Indeed you can do a lot of things with a soup-plate that would be utterly impossible with either a breakfast or a dinner plate.” “So you can,” agreed Alice. “And it saves dish-washing.” While she washed up our dinner things I made an account-book of the paper in which our purchases had been wrapped. From it, under date of November 14, 1916, I now copy: Gas stove .10 2 chops .10 gas pipe .10 ½lb butter .20 2 s. plates .10 1pt milk .07 2 cups .10 1 cereal .05 2 table spoons .05 1 bread .06 2 tea spoons .05 5lbs sugar .40 2 forks .05 5lbs rice .39 2 tins .05 salt .05 ——— 4 bananas .05 .60 6 apples .05 1.42 ——— ——— 1.42 $2.02 The fruit was bought at a push-cart market, but all the other eatables at standard shops. In one particular we were fortunate. Being Southerners we preferred rice to white potatoes.