When Mr and Mrs Twitter had dismissed the few friends that night, they
sat down at their own fireside, with no one near them but the little
foundling, which lay in the youngest Twitter's disused cradle, gazing at
them with its usual solemnity, for it did not seem to require sleep.
They opened up their minds to each other thus:--
"Now, Samuel," said Mrs Twitter, "the question is, what are you going
to do with it?"
"Well, Mariar," returned her spouse, with an assumption of profound
gravity, "I suppose we must send it to the workhouse."
"You know quite well, Sam, that you don't mean that," said Mrs Twitter,
"the dear little forsaken mite! Just look at its solemn eyes. It has
been clearly cast upon us, Sam, and it seems to me that we are bound to
look after it."
"What! with six of our own, Mariar?"
"Yes, Sam. Isn't there a song which says something about luck in odd
numbers?"
"And with only 500 pounds a year?" objected Mr Twitter.
"_Only_ five hundred. How can you speak so? We are _rich_ with five
hundred. Can we not educate our little ones?"
"Yes, my dear."
"And entertain our friends?"
"Yes, my love,--with crumpets and tea."
"Don't forget muffins and bloater paste, and German sausage and
occasional legs of mutton, you ungrateful man!"
"I don't forget 'em, Mariar. My recollection of 'em is powerful; I may
even say vivid."
"Well," continued the lady, "haven't you been able to lend small sums on
several occasions to friends--"
"Yes, my dear,--and they are _still_ loans," murmured the husband.
"And don't we give a little--I sometimes think too little--regularly to
the poor, and to the church, and haven't we got a nest-egg laid by in
the Post-office savings-bank?"
"All true, Mariar, and all _your_ doing. But for your thrifty ways, and
economical tendencies, and rare financial abilities, I should have been
bankrupt long ere now."
Mr Twitter was nothing more than just in this statement of his wife's
character. She was one of those happily constituted women who make the
best and the most of everything, and who, while by no means turning her
eyes away from the dark sides of things, nevertheless gave people the
impression that she saw only their bright sides. Her economy would have
degenerated into nearness if it had not been commensurate with her
liberality, for while, on the one hand, she was ever anxious, almost
eager, to give to the needy and suffering every penny that she could
spare, she was, on the other hand, strictly economical in trifles.
Indeed Mrs Twitter's vocabulary did not contain the word trifle. One
of her favourite texts of Scripture, which was always in her mind, and
which she had illuminated in gold and hung on her bedroom walls with
many other words of God, was, "Gather up the fragments, that nothing be
lost." Acting on this principle with all her heart, she gathered up the
fragments of time, so that she had always a good deal of that commodity
to spare, and was never in a hurry. She gathered up bits of twine and
made neat little rings of them, which she deposited in a basket--a
pretty large basket--which in time became such a repository of wealth in
that respect that the six Twitters never failed to find the exact size
and quality of cordage wanted by them--and, indeed, even after the
eldest, Sammy, came to the years of discretion, if he had suddenly
required a cable suited to restrain a first-rate iron-clad, his mind
would, in the first blush of the thing, have reverted to mother's
basket! If friends wrote short notes to Mrs Twitter--which they often
did, for the sympathetic find plenty of correspondents--the blank leaves
were always torn off and consigned to a scrap-paper box, and the pile
grew big enough at last to have set up a small stationer in business.
And so with everything that came under her influence at home or abroad.
She emphatically did what she could to prevent waste, and became a
living fulfilment of the well-known proverb, for as she wasted not she
wanted not.