and loses his hat, and gets covered with mud and disgrace, and sprains his little cousin Patty's ankle, and all because he has been rash enough to cut his piece of cord. Never was moral more sternly pointed, not even in the case of Miss Jane Taylor's heedless little Emily, who will not stoop to pick up a pin, and is punished by the loss of a whole day's pleasure, because, owing to some unexplained intricacy of her toilet,—
"She could not stir,
For just a pin to finish her."
But was whipcord such a costly article in Miss Edgeworth's time, that a small piece of it was worth so much trouble and pains? We have Hal's testimony that twice as much could have been bought for twopence; and though Hal is but a graceless young scamp, who cannot be induced to look upon twopence with becoming reverence, and who plainly has a career of want and misery before him, yet his word on this matter may be accepted as final. At the present day, the value of a bit of string saved by patient dexterity from the scissors is so infinitesimal that the hoarding up of match stumps, after the fashion of a certain great
