“There was to be sure a prodigious accumulation of errands and wants. The evening before they had been set down in great form on a slip of paper headed thus—‘things wanted.’ To how many and various catalogues that title would apply—from him who wants a blue riband to him who wants bread and cheese! My list was astounding. It was written in double columns in an invisible hand.... In good open printing it would have cut a respectable figure as a catalogue and filled a decent number of pages—a priced catalogue too, for as I had a given sum to carry to market I amused myself with calculating the proper and probable cost of every article, in which process I most egregiously cheated the shop-keeper and myself by copying with the credulity of hope from the puffs of newspapers, and expecting to buy fine solid wearable goods at advertising prices. In this way I stretched my money a good deal further than it would go, and swelled my catalogue, so that at last, in spite of compression, I had no room for another word, and was obliged to crowd several small but important articles such as cotton, laces, pins, needles, shoe-strings, etc., into that very irregular and disorderly store-house—that place where most things deposited are lost—_my memory_, by courtesy so called. “The written list was safely consigned, with a well-filled purse, to my usual repository, a black velvet bag, and the next morning I and my bag, with its nicely balanced contents of wants and money, were safely convoyed in a little open carriage to the good town of B——. There I dismounted and began to bargain most vigorously, visiting the cheapest shops, cheapening the cheapest articles, yet wisely buying the strongest and the best, a little astonished at first to find everything so much dearer than I had set it down, yet soon reconciled to this misfortune by the magical influence which shopping possesses over a woman’s fancy—all the sooner reconciled as the monetary list lay unlooked at and unthought of in its grave receptacle, the black velvet bag.