Page:The stuff of manhood (1917).djvu/46

 the producing process, young and old, male and female, from the boy that rode the plow-horse, to the grandmother knitting under her spectacles, they had no conception of squandering lightly what they all had been at work, thread by thread, and grain by grain, to produce. They knew too exactly what everything cost, even small things, not to husband them carefully. Men of patrimony in the great world, therefore, noticing their small way in trade, or expenditure, are ready, as we often see, to charge them with meanness—simply because they knew things only in the small; or, what is not far different, because they were too simple and rustic to have any conception of the big operations by which other men are wont to get their money without earning it, and lavish the more freely because it was not earned. Still, this knowing life only in the small, it will be found, is really anything but meanness.

"Probably enough the man who is heard threshing in his barn of a winter evening, by the light of a lantern, (I knew such an example) will be seen driving his team next day, the coldest day of the year, through the deep snow to a distant wood-lot to draw a load for a present to his minister. So the housewife that higgles for a half hour with the merchant over some small trade is yet one that will keep watch, not unlikely, when the schoolmaster, boarding round