So she had closets made between the two bed rooms, and likewise between the parlour and kitchen. And she gave them a chance of helping themselves still further by having a good deep, dry cellar, where they could keep their half barrel of fish, and their little joints of meat, and small pots of butter from the heats of summer, and their vegetables from the frosts of winter, and why coal and wood should be kept out of doors in winter was more than she could tell. It was easy to build a cellar, she thought, and so the cellars were made. "It seems to me," she continued to say, "that men have no idea of comfort themselves, or they would not grudge it to their poor tenants; women understand these matters better, and as God has endowed them with greater sensibilities than the other sex, why it is incumbent on them to show their grateful sense of this partiality in their favour; and how can we show it but by attending to those little things which make up, by their great number, all the happiness of life? Men never view the subject in this light, but let that alone, 'tis no concern of ours."
The thirty houses, with the plainest furniture that could be bought, cost exactly thirty thousand dollars—the precise sum she intended to appropriate to them. Fuel and repairs and taxes cost her twelve hundred a year; this with the interest on the thirty thousand, came to three thousand dollars a year. With an income of more than thirty thousand, and the prospect of a great rise in the value of her lots of ground, what was the annual loss of three thousand dollars?
As it was solely for poor widows that this charity was built, she did not allow a woman to live in one of the houses a moment after she married again; nor would she take a woman who had been twice a widow. When the children grew up and were no longer a burden to their mother, then this mother
