And now poor Mrs. Turner was startled on receiving her bank book from the bank, settled up, to find that her four thousand dollars had dwindled down to $1812.  She could not at first believe her senses.  But there were all her checks regularly entered; and, to dash even the hope that there was a mistake, there were the cancelled checks, also, bearing her own signature.

“Mary, what shall we do?” was her despairing question, as the full truth became distinct to her mind.

“You say we have sunk more than two thousand dollars in two years?”

“Yes, my child.”

“And have had all our hard labor for nothing?” Mary continued, and her voice trembled as she thought of how much she had gone through in that time.

“Yes.”

“Something must be wrong, mother.  Let us do what we should have done at first, make a careful estimate of our expenses.”

“Well.”

“It costs us just ten dollars each week for marketing—­and I know that our groceries are at least that, including flour; that you see makes twenty dollars, and we only get twenty-eight dollars for our eight boarders.  Our rent will bring our expenses up to that.  And then there are servants’ wages, fuel, our own clothes, and the boys’ schooling, besides what we lose every year, and the hundred little expenses which cannot be enumerated.”

“Bless me, Mary!  No wonder we have gone behindhand.”

“Indeed, mother, it is not.”

“We have acted very blindly, Mary.”

“Yes, we have; but we must do so no longer.  Let us give up our boarders, and move into a smaller house.”

“But what shall we do Mary?  Our money will soon dwindle away.”

“We must do something for a living, mother, that is true.  But if we cannot now see what we shall do, that is no reason why we should go on as we are.  Our rent, you know, takes away from us eight dollars a week.  We can get a house large enough for our own purposes at three dollars a week, or one hundred and fifty dollars a year, I am sure, thus saving five dollars a week there, and that money would buy all the plain food our whole family would eat.”

“But it will never do, Mary, for us to go to moving into a little bit of a pigeon-box of a house.”

“Mother, if we don’t get into a cheaper house and husband our resources, we shall soon have no house to live in!” said Mary, with unwonted energy.

“Well, child, perhaps you are right; but I can’t bear the thought of it,” Mrs. Turner replied.  “And any how, I can’t see what we are going to do then.”

“We ought to do what we see to be right, mother, had we not?” Mary asked, looking affectionately into her mother’s face.

“I suppose so, Mary.”

“Won’t it be right for us to reduce our expenses, and make the most of what we have left?”

“It certainly will, Mary.”

“Then let us do what seems to be right, and we shall see further, I am sure, as soon as we have acted.”