s too domd bad ye ain't an Irishmon."

After he had gone, Ruth said to me:

"I don't think Mr. Rafferty will make a bad alderman at all."

CHAPTER XVIII

MATURING PLANS

I received several offers from other firms and as a result of these my
wages were advanced first to three dollars a day and then to three and
a half. Still Ruth refused to take things easier by increasing the
household expenses. During the third year we lived exactly as we had
lived during the first year. In a way it was easier to do this now
that we knew there was no actual necessity for it. Of course it was
easier, too, now that we had fallen into a familiar routine. The
things which had seemed to us like necessities when we came down here
now seemed like luxuries. And we none of us had either the craving for
luxuries or the time to enjoy them had we wished to spend the money on
them. In the matter of clothes we cared for nothing except to be
warmly and cleanly dressed. Strip the problem of clothes down to this
and it's not a very serious one. To realize that you've only to
remember how the average farmer dresses or how the homesteader
dresses. It's only when you introduce style and the conventions that
the matter becomes complicated. Perhaps it was easier for me to dress
as I pleased than for the boy or Ruth but even they got right down to
bed rock. The boy wore grey flannel shirts and so at a stroke did away
with collars and cuffs. For the rest a simple blue suit, a cap,
stockings and shoes were all he needed outside his under clothes which
Ruth made for him. Ruth herself dressed in plain gowns that she could
do up herself. For the street, she still had the costumes she came
down here with. None of us kept any extra clothes for parade.

We carried out the same idea in our food, as I've tried to show; we
insisted that it must be wholesome and that there must be enough of
it. Those were the only two things that counted. Variety except of the
humblest kind, we didn't strive for. I've seen cook books which
contain five hundred pages; if Ruth compiled one it wouldn't have
twenty. Here again the farmer and the pioneer were our models. If
anyone in the country had lived the way we were living, it wouldn't
have seemed worth telling about. I find the fact which amazes people
in our experiment was that we should have tried the same standard in
the city. Everyone seems to think this was a most dangerous thing to
attempt. The men who on a camping