This little scene of innocent deception is finer, in its way, than the famous newspaper paths on which Miss Deborah’s guests step lightly over her new carpet to their respective chairs. We sympathize with Miss Matty’s anxiety about her tapers because it represents one phase of a weakness common to all mankind, and far remote, we trust, from mere vulgar parsimony, which, seeking to stint in all things, is, by its very nature, incapable of a nice spirit of selection. Even the narrator of “Cranford,” that shadowy, indistinguishable Mary Smith, who contrives so cleverly to keep her own identity in the background,--even she consents to emerge one moment from her chosen dimness, and to claim a share in this highly discriminating economy. String, she acknowledges, is her foible. Like the excellent Mr. Gresham, she would preserve it from destruction at the most liberal expenditure of other people’s time and trouble. “My pockets,” she confesses, “get full of little hanks of it, picked up and twisted together, ready for uses that never come. I am seriously annoyed if any one cuts the string of a parcel instead of patiently and faithfully undoing it fold by fold. How people can bring themselves to use India-rubber rings, which are a sort of deification of string, as lightly as they do, I cannot imagine. To me an India-rubber ring is a precious treasure. I have one which is not new; one that I picked up off the floor six years ago. I have really tried to use it, but my heart failed me, and I could not commit the extravagance.” It would be a pity to spoil this vivacious description by a touch of odious modern realism, and to hint that an India-rubber ring which had knocked about the world for six years must have parted with much of its youthful elasticity, and would be of comparatively little use to any one.