WHY SOME PERSONS ARE POOR.
In talking with a hired man who was a smoker, I asked him what his tobacco cost him a year. With some assistance in figuring, he found that the cost was only twenty dollars. He thought that was not a large sum. I told him by a few minutes calculation that if instead of smoking away twenty dollars yearly he would put that amount out at interest, and add the like sum every year, with interest also continually added in, he would accumulate in this way through life, say from twenty-five to sixty years of age, no less than four thousand dollars. He was startled at the amount, but had not the courage to leave off the habit. I knew another man, who used much more annually in tobacco, who discontinued the practice, and it enabled him in twenty years to build a three-thousand-dollar house. There are other practices which, wasting a very little at a time, cause a loss of a great deal annually. A domestic in the kitchen piles on the fire one-third more fuel than is needed. It amounts to a few cents daily, but twenty dollars at least in a year. Here is another waste of four thousand dollars in forty years. A farmer leaves his reaping machine exposed to the weather till November; his plows and harrows are out half the time; and in this way the needless decay amounts to more than twenty dollars annually—another sum running up to four thousand dollars, wasted. The want of fodder racks, and the exposure of his sheep and cattle to the winter, make a waste equal to fifty dollars yearly, and a loss of sheep by exposure, and the shrinkage in the flesh and milk of his cattle cause a yearly loss of fifty dollars more, over and above the cost or interest on properly erected shelter. These two sums would be equal to twenty thousand dollars in forty years of life-time. There are many other small leaks, both on the farm and in the kitchen—such as scraps of bread thrown away, vegetables rotting for want of assorting, knives rusting for want of cleaning, tumblers broken by immersing in hot water, harness broken for want of oiling, carpets ground out by dirt under them, pumps split by freezing, tools decayed for want of oiling and painting; every single dollar of which thus needlessly wasted annually will amount to two hundred dollars in forty years, if with interest on interest. There is no necessity of being penurious or stingy, but only to prevent actual waste.—Advocate.