cents a day is no unusual expenditure for beer or cigars, yet in
fifty years it would easily amount to twenty thousand dollars. Even a
saving of one dollar a week from the date of one's majority would give
him one thousand dollars for each of the last ten of the allotted years
of life. "What maintains one vice would bring up two children."

Such rigid economy, such high courage, enables one to surprise the world
with gifts even if he is poor. In fact, the poor and the middle classes
give most in the aggregate to missions and hospitals and to the poor.
Only frugality enables them to outdo the rich on their own ground.

But miserliness or avariciousness is a different thing from economy. The
miserly is the miserable man, who hoards money from a love of it. A
miser who spends a cent upon himself where another would spend a quarter
does it from parsimony, which is a subordinate characteristic of avarice.
Of this the following is an illustration: "True, I should like some soup,
but I have no appetite for the meat," said the dying Ostervalde; "what is
to become of that? It will be a sad waste." And so the rich Paris
banker would not let his servant buy meat for broth.

A writer on political economy tells of the mishaps resulting from a
broken latch on a farmyard gate. Every one going through would shut the
gate, but as the latch would not hold it, it would swing open with every
breeze. One day a pig ran out into the woods. Every one on the farm
went to help get him back. A gardener jumped over a ditch to stop the
pig, and sprained his ankle so badly as to be confined to his bed for two
weeks. When the cook returned, she found that her linen, left to dry at
the fire, was all badly scorched. The dairymaid in her excitement left
the cows untied, and one of them broke the leg of a colt. The gardener
lost several hours of valuable time. Yet a new latch would not have cost
five cents.

Guy, the London bookseller, and afterward the founder of the great
hospital, was a great miser, living in the back part of his shop, eating
upon an old bench, and using his counter for a table, with a newspaper
for a cloth. He did not marry. One day he was visited by "Vulture"
Hopkins, another well-known miser. "What is your business?" asked Guy,
lighting a candle. "To discuss your methods of saving money," was the
reply, alluding to the niggardly economy for which Guy was famous. On
learning Hopkins's business he blew out the l