Going to Market.
Oh, dear! these are dull times. What is a body to do? Bills cannot be collected, the season for business is over, and prospects for relief look decidedly blue. How can a woman buy a Saturday’s marketing for eight persons with only five dollars? The idea is preposterous! I could cry my eyes out with perplexity, but what’s the use?
Moses Flint is a good husband; he dotes on me, I know; yet he has no more idea of the cost of a shoulder of mutton than a Kickapoo Indian has of a sewing machine. Well, there’s no use of standing here talking about it; it must be done, but how? Oh, my poor head!
One pound of butter, fifty cents; observe—sixteen ounces of butter for eight persons, just two ounces apiece, to last until Monday morning. Why, Moses himself eats two ounces at a meal! The thought distracts me. Butter, fifty; potatoes, twenty-five; onions, fifteen; he will have onions on Sunday; won’t eat ’em through the week; says they interfere with his business; but it makes no difference the day he spends with me. I wonder if my nostrils are better adapted to smell onions than those of his customers? Men are strange mortals, anyhow; my Moses will get shaved and polish his boots to go to the lodge, but let me ask him to go with me to the dressmakers, or to the Muggins’, and he won’t even put on a clean collar. The lodge must be a very particular place.
Cabbage for slaw, ten; there is a dollar gone already. A pair of chickens, one dollar and fifty cents; rabbits would be cheaper, but he insists on chickens. It provokes me so. Last Sunday every blessed one wanted a drum-stick; of course two fowls have but four drum-sticks, therefore, as intimated before, only four got the four, which left the other four to envy the lucky four who got the four drum-sticks, and to content themselves with breasts and wings. For my part, I got only a neck and a gizzard. Well, I’ll do the best I can, but I’ll manage to squeeze out enough for two yards of that cherry-colored ribbon at Jones’, dinner or no dinner, or my name isn’t Sarah Flint.
—Geo. M. Vickers.