As to patronizing your fashionable cabinet makers and high-priced upholsterers, we were not guilty of the folly, but bought at reasonable rates from auction stores and at public sales.  Our parlor carpets cost but ninety cents a yard, and were handsomer than those for which a lady of our acquaintance. paid a dollar and thirty-eight.  Our chairs were of a neat, fancy pattern, and had cost thirty dollars a dozen.  We had hesitated for some time between a set at twenty-four dollars a dozen and these; but the style being so much more attractive, we let our taste govern in the selection.  The price of our sofa was eighteen dollars, and I thought it a really genteel affair, though my wife was not in raptures about it.  A pair of card tables for fifteen dollars, and a marble-top centre table for fourteen, gave our parlors quite a handsome appearance.

“I wouldn’t ask any thing more comfortable or genteel than this,” said, I, when the parlors were all “fixed” right.

Mrs. Jones looked pleased with the appearance of things, but did not express herself extravagantly.

In selecting our chamber furniture, a handsome dressing-bureau and French bedstead that my wife went to look at in the ware-room of a high-priced cabinet maker, tempted her strongly, and it was with some difficulty that I could get her ideas back to a regular maple four-poster, a plain, ten dollar bureau, and a two dollar dressing-glass.  Twenty and thirty dollar mattresses, too, were in her mind, but when articles of the kind, just as good to wear, could be had at eight and ten dollars, where was the use of wasting money in going higher?

The ratio of cost set down against the foregoing articles, was maintained from garret to kitchen; and I was agreeably disappointed to find, after the last bill for purchases was paid, that I was within the limit of expenditures I had proposed to make by over a hundred dollars.

The change from a boarding-house to a comfortable home was, indeed, pleasant.  We could never get done talking about it.  Every thing was so quiet, so new, so clean, and so orderly.

“This is living,” would drop from our lips a dozen times a week.

One day, about three months after we had commenced housekeeping, I came home, and, on entering the parlor, the first thing that met my eyes was a large spot of white on the new sofa.  A piece of the veneering had been knocked off, completely disfiguring it.

“What did that?” I asked of my wife.

“In setting back a chair that I had dusted,” she replied, “one of the feet touched the sofa lightly, when off dropped that veneer like a loose flake.  I’ve been examining the sofa since, and find that it is a very bad piece of work.  Just look here.”

And she drew me over to the place where my eighteen dollar sofa stood, and pointed out sundry large seams that had gaped open, loose spots in the veneering, and rickety joints.  I saw now, what I had not before seen, that the whole article was of exceedingly common material and common workmanship.