rs and
plates; a yellow pitcher, a sugar bowl and one or two dishes; half a
dozen knives and forks and spoons. It was difficult to stop in their
purchases, for the poor friends they were thinking of had nothing. So a
tin tea-pot was added to the list.

"O David!" Matilda exclaimed again--"we ought to have some soap."

"I dare say," said David dryly. "But we do not get that here."

"No; but seeing that toilet soap put me in mind of it. We get that at
the grocer's."

"It won't do for us to send in our grocer's stores just yet. When do
your people come to take possession?"

"Next week, I think. O no; not till the very day, David. Now is there
anything else we ought to get here?"

"I don't know!" said David. "I could think of a great many things; but
as you say, we must not do too much."

"What did you think of?"

"Nearly everything you see here," said David. "It seems to me they must
want everything. A coffee pot, for instance; and lamps, and cooking
utensils, and brooms and brushes and tubs and coal scuttles."

"O David, stop! They can make coffee in the tea-pot."

"Bad for the coffee I should say!" David responded, shrugging his
shoulders.

"And lamps? They cannot buy oil. I guess they go to bed when it grows
dark."

"Do they! Great loss of time, for people who live by their labour."

"And a tea-kettle, and a frying pan, and a water pot, came with the
stove, you know."

"What can they cook in a frying pan--besides fish?"

"O a great many things. But they can't _get_ the things, David; they
don't want ways to cook them."

"Must be a bad thing to be so poor," said David.

"Mustn't it! And there are so many. It is dreadful."

"Don't seem to me it ought to be," said David.

"That is what I think," said Matilda. "And O David,--don't laugh at me
as Norton does,--it seems to me it needn't be. If other people would do
without having everything, these people need not want everything."

David did smile, though, at Matilda's summary way of equalizing things.

"What would you be willing to go without?" he asked. "Come, Tilly; what
of all we have had to-day?"

"A great deal," said the little political economist steadily.

"Meringues and bananas? for instance."

"Why yes, David, and so would you, if it was to give somebody else a
dinner."

But here they remembered that the shop man was still waiting their
orders, and they left talking to attend to business. David began
apparently to amuse himself. He b