ears have passed since, and we have not paid the first
five dollar bill for repairs. All the drawers run as smoothly as
railroad cars; knobs are tight; locks in prime order, and veneers
cling as tightly to their places as if they had grown there. All is
right and tight, and wears an orderly, genteel appearance; and what
is best of all the cost of every thing we have, good as it is, is
far below the _real_ cost of what is inferior.

"It is better--much better," said I to Mrs. Jones, the other day.

"Better!" was her reply. "Yes, indeed, a thousand times better to
have good things at once. Cheap furniture is dearest in the end.
Every housekeeper ought to know this in the beginning. If we had
known it, see what we would have saved."

"If _I_ had known it, you mean," said I.

My wife looked kindly, not triumphantly, into my face, and smiled.
When she again spoke, it was on another subject.

CHAPTER VI.

LIVING AT A CONVENIENT DISTANCE.

THERE are few of us who do not feel, at some time in life, the
desire for change. Indeed, change of place corresponding, as it
does, in outward nature, to change of state in the mind, it is not
at all surprising that we should, now and then, feel a strong desire
to remove from the old, and get into new locations, and amid
different external associations. Thus, we find, in many families, an
ever recurring tendency to removal. Indeed, I have some housekeeping
friends who are rarely to be found in the same house, or in the same
part of the city, in any two consecutive years. Three moves,
Franklin used to say, were equal to a fire. There are some to whom I
could point, who have been, if this holds true, as good as burned
out, three or four times in the last ten years.

But, I must not write too long a preface to my present story. Mr.
Smith and myself cannot boast of larger organs of Inhabitativeness--I
believe, that is the word used by phrenologists--than many of
our neighbors. Occasionally we have felt dissatisfied with the
state of things around us, and become possessed of the demon of
change. We have moved quite frequently, sometimes attaining superior
comfort, and some times, getting rather the worst of, it for
"the change."

A few years ago, in the early spring-time, Mr. Smith said to me, one
day:

"I noticed, in riding out yesterday, a very pleasant country house
on the Frankford Road, to let, and it struck me that it would be a
fine thing for us, both as to health an