Wealth's wasteful tricks I will not learn Nor ape the glittering upstart fool;-- Shall not carved tables serve my turn, But _all_ must be of buhl? Give grasping pomp its double share,-- I ask but _one_ recumbent chair. Thus humble let me live and die, Nor long for Midas' golden touch; If Heaven more generous gifts deny, I shall not miss them _much_,-- Too grateful for the blessing lent Of simple tastes and mind content! TOM'S MONEY BY HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD Mrs. Laughton had found what she had been looking for all her life--the man under her bed. Every night of her nearly thirty years of existence this pretty little person had stooped on her knees, before saying her prayers, and had investigated the space beneath her bed, a light brass affair, hung with a chintz valance; had then peered beneath the dark recess of the dressing-case, and having looked in the deep drawer of the bureau and into the closet, she fastened her door and felt as secure as a snail in a shell. As she never, in this particular business, seemed to have any confidence in Mr. Laughton, in spite of the fact that she admired him and adored him, neither his presence nor his absence ever made any variation in the performance. She had gone through the motions, however, for so long a time that they had come to be in a manner perfunctory, and the start she received on this night of which I speak made her prayers quite impossible. What was she to do? She, a coward _par eminence_, known to be the most timorous of the whole family; her tremors at all sorts of imagined dangers affording laughter to the flock of sisters and brothers. Should she stay on her knees after having seen that dark shape, as if going on with her prayers, while revolving some plan of procedure? That was out of the question. Scream? She couldn't have screamed to save her life. Run? She could no more have set one foot before the other, than if her body had melted from the waist down. She was deadly faint and cold and shaking, and all in a second, in the fraction of a second, before she had risen from her stooping posture.