“Ha! A fine way to be raised. These Americans, they know nothing of economy. They ought to live in Germany awhile. Then they would know what a dollar can do.” Lester heard something of this through Jennie, but he only smiled. Gerhardt was amusing to him. Another grievance was Lester’s extravagant use of matches. He had the habit of striking a match, holding it while he talked, instead of lighting his cigar, and then throwing it away. Sometimes he would begin to light a cigar two or three minutes before he would actually do so, tossing aside match after match. There was a place out in one corner of the veranda where he liked to sit of a spring or summer evening, smoking and throwing away half-burned matches. Jennie would sit with him, and a vast number of matches would be lit and flung out on the lawn. At one time, while engaged in cutting the grass, Gerhardt found, to his horror, not a handful, but literally boxes of half-burned match-sticks lying unconsumed and decaying under the fallen blades. He was discouraged, to say the least. He gathered up this damning evidence in a newspaper and carried it back into the sitting-room where Jennie was sewing. “See here, what I find!” he demanded. “Just look at that! That man, he has no more sense of economy than a—than a—” the right term failed him. “He sits and smokes, and this is the way he uses matches. Five cents a box they cost—five cents. How can a man hope to do well and carry on like that, I like to know. Look at them.” Jennie looked. She shook her head. “Lester is extravagant,” she said. Gerhardt carried them to the basement. At least they should be burned in the furnace. He would have used them as lighters for his own pipe, sticking them in the fire to catch a blaze, only old newspapers were better, and he had stacks of these—another evidence of his lord and master’s wretched, spendthrift disposition. It was a sad world to work in. Almost everything was against him. Still he fought as valiantly as he could against waste and shameless extravagance. His own economies were rigid. He would wear the same suit of black—cut down from one of Lester’s expensive investments of years before—every Sunday for a couple of years. Lester’s shoes, by a little stretch of the imagination, could be made to seem to fit, and these he wore. His old ties also—the black ones—they were fine. If he could have cut down Lester’s shirts he would have done so; he did make over the underwear, with the friendly aid of the cook’s needle. Lester’s socks, of course, were just right. There was never any expense for Gerhardt’s clothing.