The cloth for the centre-table was neatly worked; the window-curtains were strips of rich coloured cotton sewed together; the colours matched the colours of the carpet. To my question to Sarah, where she had got all these pretty materials, she replied, “Oh, ma’am, we did not buy them with money, but we bought them and paid for them with labour, father says.”
These little girls were early beginning to learn that truth in political economy, that all property is produced and obtained by labour. “Miss Laverty, the upholsteress, works up stairs; we picked hair for her, and she paid us in these pieces.”
“The centre-table, bedstead, and chairs,” said the mother, “and the wardrobe for the bed-chamber, Charlie made. The bed-sheets, pillows, spreads, &c., the girls made from pieces fished, as they say, out of my piece-basket. The work was all done in their play hours; their working time is not theirs, and therefore they could not give it away.”
“I see,” said I, looking at some very pretty pictures hanging around the parlour and chamber walls, “how these are arranged; they seem cut out of old books, pasted against pasteboard, and bound around with gilt paper; but pray tell me how this little mamma doll was bought, and the little baby in the cradle, and this pretty tea-set, and the candle-sticks, and the book-case and flower-vase on the centre-table, and the parlour stove. Charlie could make none of these things; you could not contrive them out of Miss Laverty’s pieces; and surely the three sixpences left after your expenditure for the kitchen, would go very little way towards paying for them.”
“To tell the truth, ma’am,” said Mrs. Selby, “the girls were at their wits’ ends. Miss Laverty could not afford to pay them money for their work. I had got almost as much interested in fitting up the baby-house as they, and would gladly have given them a little more money, but I had not a shilling to spare. Sarah and Lucy laid their heads together one night after they went to bed, and in the morning they came to me and told me their plan.
“We have always a pudding-pie on Sunday instead of meat. ‘Can’t you, mother,’ said they, ‘reckon up what our portion of the pie costs?—Make one just large enough for you, and my father, and Nannie, and we will eat dry bread, and then, with the money saved, added to our three sixpences, we will get what we can.’ At first I thought it rather hard upon the children, but my husband and I talked it over together, and we concluded, as it was their own proposal, to let them do it. We thought it might be teaching them, ma’am, to have love, as one may say, stronger than appetite, and work their little self-denial up with their love, and industry, and ingenuity. Poor people, such as we, cannot do what rich people can, for the education of their children. But there are some things we can do, which rich people can’t—our poor circumstances help us. When our children want to do a kindness, as in this matter of the baby-house, they can’t run to father and mother, and get money to do it with; they are obliged to think it out, and work it out, as one may say: and I believe it is the great end of education, ma’am, to make mind, heart, and hand work.”
Again I looked at the baby-house, and with real respect for the people who had furnished it. The figures on the carpet, the gay curtains, tables, chairs, &c., were all very pretty, and very suitably and neatly arranged, but they were something more,—outward forms, into which Charles, Sarah, and Lucy had breathed, a soul instinct with love, kindheartedness, diligence, and self-denial.
Now, I ask my young friends to compare the gifts of the poor carpenter’s children to those of the empress. Hers cost a single order, and a great deal of money,—theirs, much labour and forethought. If the happiness produced in the two cases, to both giver and receiver, were calculated, which would be the greatest amount? And which, in reality, were the richest—the rich empress’s grandchildren, or the poor carpenter’s little family?