"It is so," said my mother, with mild positiveness. "And indeed, what with the game and fish, and the garden and poultry-yard, and your own mutton, our housekeeping will be next to nothing," "Hem!" again said the thrifty Roland, with a slight inflection of the beetle brows. "It may be next to nothing, ma'am,--sister,--just as a butcher's shop may be next to Northumberland House; but there is a vast deal between nothing and that next neighbor you have given it." This speech was so like one of my father's--so naive an imitation of that subtle reasoner's use of the rhetorical figure called Antanaclasis (or repetition of the same words in a different sense)--that I laughed and my mother smiled. But she smiled reverently, not thinking of the Antanaclasis, as, laying her hand on Roland's arm, she replied in the yet more formidable figure of speech called Epiphonema (or exclamation), "Yet, with all your economy, you would have had us--" "Tut!" cried my uncle, parrying the Epiphonema with a masterly Aposiopesis (or breaking off); "tut! if you had done what I wished, I should have had more pleasure for my money!" My poor mother's rhetorical armory supplied no weapon to meet that artful Aposiopesis; so she dropped the rhetoric altogether, and went on with that "unadorned eloquence" natural to her, as to other great financial reformers: "Well, Roland, but I am a good housewife, I assure you, and--Don't scold; but that you never do;--I mean, don't look as if you would like to scold. The fact is, that even after setting aside L100 a year for our little parties--" "Little parties!--a hundred a year!" cried the Captain, aghast. My mother pursued her way remorselessly,--"which we can well afford; and without counting your half-pay, which you must keep for pocket-money and your wardrobe and Blanche's,--I calculate that we can allow Pisistratus L150 a year, which, with the scholarship he is to get, will keep him at Cambridge" (at that, seeing the scholarship was as yet amidst the Pleasures of Hope, I shook my head doubtfully), "and," continued my mother, not heeding that sign of dissent, "we shall still have something to lay by." The Captain's face assumed a ludicrous expression of compassion and horror; he evidently thought my mother's misfortunes had turned her head. His tormentor continued. "For," said my mother, with a pretty calculating shake of her head, and a movement of the right forefinger towards the five fingers of the left hand, "L370,--the interest of Austin's fortune,--and L50 that we may reckon for the rent of our house, make L420 a year. Add your L330 a year from the farm, sheep-walk, and cottages that you let, and the total is L750. Now, with all we get for nothing for our housekeeping, as I said before, we can do very well with L500 a year, and indeed make a handsome figure. So, after allowing Sisty L150, we still have L100 to lay by for Blanche."