Oh, dear! these are dull times. What is a body to do? Bills cannot be collected, the season for business is over, and prospects for relief look decidedly blue. How can a woman buy a Saturday’s marketing for eight persons with only five dollars? The idea is preposterous! I could cry my eyes out with perplexity, but what’s the use?
Moses Flint is a good husband; he dotes on me, I know; yet he has no more idea of the cost of a shoulder of mutton than a Kickapoo Indian has of a sewing machine. Well, there’s no use of standing here talking about it; it must be done, but how? Oh, my poor head!
One pound of butter, fifty cents; observe—sixteen ounces of butter for eight persons, just two ounces apiece, to last until Monday morning. Why, Moses himself eats two ounces at a meal! The thought distracts me. Butter, fifty; potatoes, twenty-five; onions, fifteen; he will have onions on Sunday; won’t eat ’em through the week; says they interfere with his business; but it makes no difference the day he spends with me. I wonder if my nostrils are better adapted to smell onions than those of his customers? Men are strange mortals, anyhow; my Moses will get shaved and polish his boots to go to the lodge, but let me ask him to go with me to the dressmakers, or to the Muggins’, and he won’t even put on a clean collar. The lodge must be a very particular place.
Cabbage for slaw, ten; there is a dollar gone already. A
pair of chickens, one dollar and fifty cents; rabbits would be cheaper, but he insists on chickens. It provokes me so. Last Sunday every blessed one wanted a drum-stick; of course two fowls have but four drum-sticks, therefore, as intimated before, only four got the four, which left the other four to envy the lucky four who got the four drum-sticks, and to content themselves with breasts and wings. For my part, I got only a neck and a gizzard. Well, I’ll do the best I can, but I’ll manage to squeeze out enough for two yards of that cherry-colored ribbon at Jones’, dinner or no dinner, or my name isn’t Sarah Flint.
—Geo. M. Vickers.
The Merry Sunflower.
With a little ingenuity and with six musical voices this piece may be made a very pleasing and attractive feature in an evening’s entertainment. Procure a piece of sheeting at least six feet in length by five in width. Fasten the lower lengthwise edge to the floor of the stage, and the upper edge, by means of cords or other fastenings, to the ceiling. Cut three holes about the height of a person’s face in standing and of the shape and size of the face, and three others at kneeling height; then around these holes paint or paste on paper to represent the petals of immense sunflowers, with stalks attached. The singer’s faces occupy the holes, and the words are sung to the air of “The Little Brown Jug.”
1ST VOICE.
Oh, I’m a namesake of the Sun,