But was whipcord such a costly article in Miss Edgeworth’s time, that a small piece of it was worth so much trouble and pains? We have Hal’s testimony that twice as much could have been bought for twopence; and though Hal is but a graceless young scamp, who cannot be induced to look upon twopence with becoming reverence, and who plainly has a career of want and misery before him, yet his word on this matter may be accepted as final. At the present day, the value of a bit of string saved by patient dexterity from the scissors is so infinitesimal that the hoarding up of match stumps, after the fashion of a certain great banker, would really seem the quicker road to wealth. But the true gain in these minute economies is of a strictly moral nature, and serves, when we know we have been extravagant, to balance our account with conscience. The least practical of us have some petty thrift dear to our hearts, some one direction in which we love to scrimp. I have known wealthy men who grudged themselves and their families nothing that money could buy, yet were made perfectly miserable by the amount of gas burned nightly in their homes. They roamed around with manifest and pitiful uneasiness, stealthily turning down a burner here and there, whenever they could do so unperceived, dimming the glories of their glass and gilding, and reducing upper halls and familiar stairways into very pitfalls for the stumbling of the unwary. The advent of lamps has brought but scant solace to these sufferers, for their economy is, in fact, much older than the gas itself, and flourished exceedingly in the days of wax tapers and tallow-dips. We read in the veracious chronicles of “Cranford” how Miss Matty Jenkyns, so thoughtlessly generous in all other matters, had for her one pet frugality the hoarding of her candles, and by how many intricate devices the dear old lady sought to cherish and protect these objects of her tender solicitude. “They (the candles) were usually brought in with tea, but we only burned one at a time. As we lived in constant preparation for a friend who might come in any moment (but who never did), it required some contrivance to keep them of the same length, ready to be lighted, and to look as if we burned two always. They took it in turns, and, whatever we might be talking about or doing, Miss Matty’s eyes were habitually fixed upon the candle, ready to jump up and extinguish it, and to light the other, before they had become too uneven in length to be restored to equality in the course of the evening.”