A year passed away without any additional income.  No! we forget there has been an income, and a very important one; it consists in the dearest little babe that ever a mother held tenderly to her loving breast, or ever a father bent over and looked upon with pride.  Before the appearance of this little stranger, and while his coming was anxiously looked for, there was a due portion of anxiety felt by Mr. Bancroft, as to how the additional expense that must come, would be met.  He did not see his way clear.  After the babe was born, and he saw and felt what a treasure he had obtained, he was perfectly satisfied to make the best of what he had, and try to lop off some little self-indulgences, for the sake of meeting the new demands that were to be made upon his purse.

At first, as Mrs. Bancroft had now to have some assistance, and they had but two rooms, a parlor and chamber adjoining, it was thought best to look out for a small house; the objection to this was the additional rent to be paid.  After debating the matter, and looking at it on all sides, for some time, they were relieved from their difficulty by the offer of the family from which they rented, to let their girl sleep in one of the garret-rooms, where their own domestic slept.  This met the case exactly.  The only increased expense for the present, on account of the babe, was a dollar a week to a stout girl of fourteen, and the cost of her boarding, no very serious matter, and more than met from little curtailments that were easily made.  So the babe was stowed snugly into the little family, without any necessity for an enlargement of its border.  It fit in so nicely that it seemed as if the place it occupied had just been made for it.

And now Mr. Bancroft felt the home-attraction increasing.  His steps were more briskly taken when he left his desk and turned his back, in the quiet eventide, upon ledgers and account books.

At the end of another year, Mr. Bancroft found that his expenses and his salary had just balanced each other.  There was no preponderance any way.  Like the manna that fell in the wilderness from heaven, the supply was equal to the demand.  This, however, did not satisfy him.  He had a great desire to get a little ahead.  In the three years preceding his marriage, he had saved enough to buy the furniture with which they were enabled to go to housekeeping, in a small way; but, since then, it took every dollar to meet their wants.

“In case of sickness and the running up of a large doctor’s bill, what should I do?” he would sometimes ask himself, anxiously; “or, suppose I were thrown out of employment?”

These questions always made him feel serious.  The prospect of a still further increase in his family caused him to be really troubled.

“It is just as much as I can now do to make both ends meet,” he would say, despondingly, and sometimes give utterance to such expressions even in the presence of his wife.  Mrs. Bancroft was not a woman very deeply read in the prevailing philosophies of the day; but she had a simple mode of reasoning, or rather of concluding, on most subjects that came up for her special consideration.  On this matter, in particular, so perplexing to her husband, her very satisfactory solution to the difficulty, was this—­