It was, indeed, a beautiful system of economy. The Fabbins’s homestead was a little world in itself of ways and means—a microcosm, where, for years, every thing that was needed stood at hand ready for use, and every thing had its place. You could not lay your hand upon the merest bit of broken crockery, or rusty nail, or weather-stained shingle, or fragment of tangled twine, but it came into service, sooner or later, in some part of the establishment—at least so my aunt always affirmed. Honor to these good old folks for their principles and their practice. If the world—if society at large—if government could but take a lesson from these humble lights of their little circle, how much poverty, and crime, and misery, would be avoided, which now runs riot over the world. But, alas! there is an old adage which will come sneaking into the corner of my brain, as I continue to trace my way up toward the old garret—some cynic philosopher must have given it birth; “too much of a good thing is good for nothing.” Rather harsh, friend philosopher, but the rough shell may be found to contain a kernel of truth. And here I am much disposed to fall into some deep reflections, and give utterance to some very profound remarks, and even go into some winding digressions about the philosophy of ultraism, and show how there is no one truth, or good principle, which, if emphasized too strongly and exclusively, may not result in a falsity and an evil. Virtue may become vice, truth error, if we persist in riding our favorite hobby forever in the same way, and on the same road. Let us not dwell forever in the parts and particles of good, but in the whole. Let us not breathe the gasses, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, or carbonic acid, but _air_. Having taken my patient reader this long step upward, we come to a landing and a breathing place on the stairs. Let us have a little more patience yet, and we shall finally come to the garret. I already, in fancy, begin to inhale its musty fragrance. Acting uniformly on this principle of throwing away or destroying nothing that might, at some future time, be turned to account in some of the departments of the household economy, my good uncle and aunt had gradually accumulated around them a little of every thing that was ever known or thought of in the memorandum-book of a housekeeper. It so happened that they had gone through several removals from one house to another, in their forty years of housekeeping, (they always had an aversion to boarding,) and all their effects from the greatest to the least, from looking-glasses and bedsteads down to broken saucers and barrel-hoops, were always taken along with them. Not a scrap of any kind, were it nothing more than an old newspaper, or a dozen of old broken corks, was ever suffered to be thrown away.