happiness is continuous.  Just as it is in mending.  Short-sighted, superficial, unreflecting people have a way—­which in time fossilizes into a principle—­of mending everything as soon as it comes up from the wash, a very unthrifty, uneconomical habit, if you use the words thrift and economy in the only way in which they ought to be used, namely, as applied to what is worth economizing.  Time, happiness, life, these are the only things to be thrifty about.  But I see people working and worrying over quince-marmalade and tucked petticoats and embroidered chair-covers, things that perish with the using and leave the user worse than they found him.  This I call waste and wicked prodigality.  Life is too short to permit us to fret about matters of no importance.  Where these things can minister to the mind and heart, they are a part of the soul’s furniture; but where they only pamper the appetite or the vanity or any foolish and hurtful lust, they are foolish and hurtful.  Be thrifty of comfort.  Never allow an opportunity for cheer, for pleasure, for intelligence, for benevolence, for any kind of good, to go unimproved.  Consider seriously whether the sirup of your preserves or the juices of your own soul will do the most to serve your race.  It may be that they are compatible,—­that the concoction of the one shall provide the ascending sap of the other; but if it is not so, if one must be sacrificed, do not hesitate a moment as to which it shall be.  If a peach does not become sweetmeat, it will become something, it will not stay a withered, unsightly peach; but for souls there is no transmigration out of fables.  Once a soul, forever a soul,—­mean or mighty, shrivelled or full, it is for you to say.  Money, land, luxury, so far as they are money, land, and luxury, are worthless.  It is only as fast and as far as they are turned into life that they acquire value.

So you are thriftless when you eagerly seize the first opportunity to fritter away your time over old clothes.  You precipitate yourself unnecessarily against a disagreeable thing.  For you are not going to put your stockings on.  Perhaps you will not need your buttons for a week, and in a week you may have passed beyond the jurisdiction of buttons.  But even if you should not, let the buttons and the holes alone all the same.  For, first, the pleasant and profitable thing which you will do instead is a funded capital which will roll you up a perpetual interest; and secondly, the disagreeable duty is forever abolished.  I say forever, because, when you have gone without the button awhile, the inconvenience it occasions will reconcile you to the necessity of sewing it on,—­will even go farther, and make it a positive relief amounting to positive pleasure.  Besides, every time you use it, for a long while after you will have a delicious sense of satisfaction, such as accompanies the sudden complete cessation of a dull, continuous pain.  Thus what was at best characterless routine, and most likely an exasperation, is turned into actual delight, and adds to the sum of life.  This is thrift.  This is economy.  But, alas! few people understand the art of living.  They strive after system, wholeness, buttons, and neglect the weightier matters of the higher law.