MRS. L. N. MONMOUTH. 431 her that she must think and act for herself. Take hoard- ers she would not, on account of her health. Her house, if she sold it, would not bring more than six hundred dollars, a sum too small for the purchase of a cottage, and which, if used for paying board, would soon have slipped away and left her dependent upon charity. The house was old, dreary, and dilapidated. "The roofs leaked," she says, "the windows were rickety, the chimney discharged a mournful brickbat in every driving storm." But it was a shelter ; it was dear to her ; and she resolved to keep it. The land upon which it stood yielded twenty dollars a year in hay, twelve for pasture, and in good years three for apples. By knitting and making artificial flowers, the only work she was able to do, she could depend upon earning fifteen dollars more. These sums together equaled an income of exactly fifty dollars, ten of which would be required for taxes. Upon the remaining forty she determined to live, and did live. She did not enter upon this desperate experiment with- out serious misgivings. Her first thought was to assign twenty dollars out of the precious forty for food, but this sum she soon reduced to seventeen. Better starve the body than the mind, she thought, and the three dollars thus saved were used to continue her subscription to her favorite weekly newspaper. She did better even than this ; for in her final apportionment of expenditures we find ten dollars — one-quarter of her whole income exclu- sive of taxes — set apart for the purchase of reading mat- ter ; the only other item in the list, besides food, being thirteen dollars for fuel. Not a single penny did she devote to dress, and the ingenious shifts by which she succeeded in clothing her- self respectably and sufficiently upon nothing a year, for three years, are worthy of study, and cannot fail to excite
