"A little oil lamp with a weighted base can be bought for a few cents," someone tells me brightly, says a writer in "The Listener," "Left on the hall table, it saves switching on the light every time you go through." "What a good idea!" says Anne (she's very conscientious about economy schemes) "Let's get one." So we did. It.cost a dollar, and we had to fill it with paraffin oil every other day. We stood it on the little table in the hall, and after a few days there was a round black soot mark on the ceiling, several rings on the table where the oil had fetched the polish off, and a dreadful smell of paraffin all over the place.
Every time we opened the front door, the lamp blew out.
Anne said, Yes it was a shame about the soot and the ring marks, but think of the money we were saving.
I said we had never worked it out—that if we did we should probably find we weren't saving anything at all, and she said, in a rather. shocked sort of voice, that I ought not to say things like that, offtourse it saved money. It said so in the paper, and they wouldn't say a thing like that in the paper if it hadn't been worked out, would they? Well, to cut a long argument short, we did work it out, and we found that a twenty-five: watt electric lamp, giving a much better light than this smelly oil contraption, would burn for forty hours continuously for practically nothing. so we solemnly and gladly threw the little oil lamp with the weighted base into the dustbin,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.