The Art of Living

The Art of Living
BY Robert Grant
New York Charles Scribner’s Sons MDCCCXCIX

Copyright, 1895 and 1899, by Charles Scribner’s Sons


Rogers, the book-keeper for the past twenty-two years of my friend Patterson, the banker, told me the other day that he had reared a family of two boys and three girls on his annual salary of two thousand two hundred dollars; that he had put one of the boys through college, one through the School of Mines, brought up one of the girls to be a librarian, given one a coming-out party and a trousseau, and that the remaining daughter, a home body, was likely to be the domestic sunshine of his own and his wife’s old age. All this on two thousand two hundred dollars a year.
Rogers told me with perfect modesty, with just a tremor of self-satisfaction in his tone, as though, all things considered, he felt that he had managed creditably, yet not in the least suggesting that he regarded his performance as out of the common run of happy household annals. He is a neat-looking, respectable, quiet, conservative little man, rising fifty, who, while in the bank, invariably wears a nankeen jacket all the year round, a narrow black necktie in winter, and a narrow yellow and red pongee wash tie in summer, and whose watch is no less invariably right to a second. As I often drop in to see Patterson, his employer, I depend upon it to keep mine straight, and it was while I was setting my chronometer the other day that he made me the foregoing confidence.