For
her part, she put her trust in teapots and stockings, with richer hoards
wrapped in rags and sewn up in the mattress, and here a few odd pounds
under the rice and there a few hidden in the coffee. That was her idea
of a banking account, and she held it to be the best there was.
"Don't lend your hat," she used to say, "and then you'll not have to go
bareheaded." And sometimes, talking of loans on securities, she would
take a pinch of snuff and say she "reckoned nowt of that man who locked
his own granary door and gave another man the key."
To all appearance, she lived only to scrape and hoard, moidering away
her loveless life on the futile energies and sordid aims of a miser's
wretched pleasures. But every now and then she had risen up out of the
slough into which she had gradually sunk, and had done some grand things
that marked her name with so many white stones. While she gloried in her
skill in filching from the pig what would serve the chickens, in making
Jenny go short to save to-day's baking of havre-bread, in skimping Tim's
bowl of porridge--his appetite being a burden on her estate which she
often declared would break her--she had more than once given a hundred
pounds at a blow to build a raft for a poor drowning wretch who must
otherwise have sunk. In fact, she was one of those people who are small
with the small things of life and great with the great--who will grudge
a daily dole of a few threshed-out stalks of straw, but who sometimes,
when rightly touched, will shower down with both hands full sheaves of
golden grain.
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