ut I do ask my
lady friends to give it fair and candid and prayerful consideration.
Which do you really care most about--a diamond on your finger, or a star
in the Redeemer's kingdom, shining for ever and ever? That is what it
comes to, and there I leave it.

On the other hand, it is very possible to be fairly faithful in much, and
yet unfaithful in that which is least. We may have thought about our gold
and silver, and yet have been altogether thoughtless about our rubbish!
Some have a habit of hoarding away old garments, 'pieces,' remnants, and
odds and ends generally, under the idea that they 'will come in useful
some day;' very likely setting it up as a kind of mild virtue, backed by
that noxious old saying, 'Keep it by you seven years, and you'll find a
use for it.' And so the shabby things get shabbier, and moth and dust
doth corrupt, and the drawers and places get choked and crowded; and
meanwhile all this that is sheer rubbish to you might be made useful at
once, to a degree beyond what you would guess, to some poor person.

It would be a nice variety for the clever fingers of a lady's maid to be
set to work to do up old things; or some tidy woman may be found in
almost every locality who knows how to contrive children's things out of
what seems to you only fit for the rag-bag, either for her own little
ones or those of her neighbours.

My sister trimmed 70 or 80 hats every spring for several years with the
contents of friends' rubbish drawers, thus relieving dozens of poor
mothers who liked their children to 'go tidy on Sunday,' and also keeping
down finery in her Sunday school. Those who literally fulfilled her
request for 'rubbish' used to marvel at the results.

Little scraps of carpet, torn old curtains, faded blinds, and all such
gear, go a wonderfully long way towards making poor cottagers and old or
sick people comfortable. I never saw anything in this 'rubbish' line yet
that could not be turned to good account somehow, with a little
_considering_ of the poor and their discomforts.

I wish my lady reader would just leave this book now, and go straight
up-stairs and have a good rummage at once, and see what can be thus
cleared out. If she does not know the right recipients at first hand, let
her send it off to the nearest working clergyman's wife, and see how
gratefully it will be received! For it is a great trial to workers among
the poor not to be able to supply the needs they see. Such supplies are