When I wasa little boy, the favourite economy was paper spills. You made the container first; a cocoa tin with a bit of wallpaper stuck tastefully round it, and pink ribbon to hang it up by. Then you cut a newspaper into strips and twiddled the strips up into thin tubes with a flourish on the end, and they all stood in the tin which hung by the fire from a tack in the mantelshelf. My, In the Pink An Old-fashioned House In my bedroom here there is an old-fashioned comfort that I find enjoyable—something of the "tender grace of a day that is dead." It/is a bedroom that is a bedroom indeed. The furniture is solid and shining and ornate, brass-handled and gold-scrolled, a sort of spurious First Empire. The big brass bed could not possibly be turned into a divan by day, and the washstand is marble-topped and marble-backed. The draperies are pink—pink-spotted net curtains, longer pink casement curtains, pink eiderdown, pink pincushions. The ewer and basin are pink, and so are the little china figures on the mantel-piece. Inside a pink figured globe the gas flickers dubiously. The cover of my. hot-water bag is pink and woolly; my blotter's cover is of pink linen.
Tessie, the housemaid, soft footed and soft spoken, taps on my door as the housemaids of last century used to do, bringing cans of hot water at suitable intervals. When I ask her to hand me my dressing jacket, which by a happy chance is pink, she says, "Yes, M'm," and not "Okay." father used to offer me a ha'penny for making fifty, and mind I did not cut up today's paper or I should get a good hiding. A ha'penny for fifty! No wonder my childish mind brooded on the evils of sweated labour, and glorious revolution. And if my spills saved more than one penny box of matches in all the years I was making them, I should be surprised.
"Ah," you say, "but, many a mickle makes a muckle!" I don't believe it?
Add all the spills I ever made to all the bits of string my grandfather saved, and what do you get for the endeavour of two lifetimes? ' Threepence. Did I say my grandfather saved bits of string? He did. And in the course of a long and active life he made a small fortune. But his fortune came from standing drinks and smoking cigars in the right company, and his bits of string, if placed end to end, would probably have equalled one twopenny ball—a nice, clean, tidy twopenny ball too—not dirty old second-hand scraps.
"They Manage These Things—"
"We heard the other day that in France, where, as you know, these things are managed so much better, a favourite economy is not to use floor polish straight out of the tin but to thin it down with paraffin oil. Anne thought shed like to try this, and she joyfully scooped out a chunk of lovely wax polish and began to mush it up with oil into a wet and sticky mess. "Try it under the mat first," I said, and she did, and it soaked into our beautiful golden oak boards and turned them brown. Some got spilt on the plaster, and the house began to take on that depressing smell it had when we were using the money-saving little brass lamp.
Mind you, I'm not saying this isn't a good idea—maybe we had the wrong polish or the wrong floor or something. I'm only saying how glad I was I told Anne to try it under the mat first.
And I'm not sneering at economy—I have to be frightfully economical myself these days—but some of these pleasant little money-saving dodges do want looking into. Like Anne's bright ideas for using up a tablespoonful of cold potatoes. They generally involve opening a tin of salmon, or melting half-a-pound of butter, or leaving the oven on for half a day. "It does seem wicked to waste them," she says sach "So it does," I say and throw them ruthlessly in the dustbin.
At table the parlour-maid "hands round," but I sometimes, with shame, find myself stretching out an avid paw to take my plate from my hostess, so remote is my experience of Victorian amenities.
There are no convenient gas fires, with their nerve-shattering "plops," no electric fires that look so much warmer than they feel, but logs and coals that spurt in huge old-fashioned extravagant grates. Surely in some attic there must be the kind of bath, round and shallow, that was brought up of a morning to the Victorian nursery and placed in front of such fires as these?
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.