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Have you ever, in hours of illness or of great preoccupation, performed some piece of work; undertaken, for example, some long-drawn piece of needlework, and woven your thoughts into the leaves and flowers? Through force of association, your inner experience and your work were henceforth completely identified, and after many years you could still say to yourself: This flower recalls the day when I was expecting news of my sick and absent son. I wavered between fear and hope and my hand trembled. Something of his fever has remained in this frail stem.... Here is a swallow that I embroidered after I had received happy tidings that reassured me and announced his near return. Never shall I be able to look at it without thinking of all the joy of which a mother’s heart is capable!
The labor involved in economy is like these patient toils. The little pennies also have their story. This story is made up of watchfulness, of cares, of tenderness, of sublime sacrifice. Never will the large sums of nameless money attain to the power of signification possest by these little pennies amassed one by one, put carefully away, to which one has said: Little penny, I keep you to-day in order that you may keep me to-morrow; I give you a post of honor; the day when misery approaches my sill and threatens to cross it, you will cry out: you may not pass!—Charles Wagner, “The Gospel of Life.”
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Economy by Inventions—See [Labor-saving Inventions].
ECONOMY, DIVINE
The autographs of musicians who in life could not write a check for a crust of bread have in death been sold for fabulous sums. Not long ago at a sale in Berlin two of Beethoven’s letters sold for $187 and $200 each. A letter of Chopin brought $250, a visiting-card of Haydn $20 and a letter $427, two letters of Schubert $777, four letters of Wagner $322, a scrap of writing of Mozart sold for $276, while a Gluck manuscript changed hands at $1,000. Some of these men in life hardly received enough for their services to keep their musical souls connected with their emaciated bodies; but they wasted themselves in pouring out their immortal melodies, and this generation is putting down its gold for mere scraps of paper that had felt the touch of their dead hands! Of course, their service and music are not lost; but look! God does not even allow the screeds of paper, which were once crumpled by their perished fingers, to be lost, either! While their music is filling the world with its sweetness God is even picking up the tattered, torn, broken fragments blown by cruel winds up and down the desert of their lives, that nothing be lost!—F. F. Shannon.
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