ALL MISERS

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 91, 17 April 1923, Page 3

ALL MISERS

AS TRADITION HAS PAINTED THEM

Tradition has (writes a correspondent of the "Melbourne Age") painted the miser as a white-haired, decrepit old creature, who grows rich by seeming poor, and who fondles and runs his gold through his fingers at the dead of night when all the rest of the world is asleep. Such misers are rare, and rarely sane. The ordinary, everyday miser is not rare. Most of vs —in fact, all of of us— are misers in some degree. The typical miser, of course, is the poor creature who is grossly coveteous in money matters, and miserable. The very etymology of the word miser indicates the necessary unhappiness of that spirit. But in its broader sense miser ,is not necessarily associated with misery. Once I slept in the same room with a man who had a mania for hanging on to his old hats. He was a hat miser. He.was a comparatively young man, and quite a decent fellow. But he could not part with a hat. We were lodgers together at the same boardinghouse, and, as his bedroom mate, I protested more than once about his objectionable practice of storing these dusty old hats. He had a full dozen and a half of them,- standing on top of the wardrobe, crown into crown, like a consignment of headgear just unpacked in a draper's shop. "Why don't you send them to the Old Men's Home?" I urged one night. But my fellow lodger, happily, merely shook his head. "That's a good hat," he said, taking down the topmost one. "I might wear it again." "Why don't you wear it now?" He pointed to the hat lying on his bed and to another —a glossy Stetson — that hung in the wardrobe, and spread out his hands expressively. He had better hats for the time being. "I tell you what I will do," I said in desperation. "I will give you sixpence for each of them." "What will you do with them? he inquired cautiously. "Throw them into the dust bin, or give them to the first beggar I meet." He shook his head in a shocked way, and went on with his toilet, after replacing carefully, almost tenderly, on the wardrobe pile the hat he had taken down for inspection, and which I was certain he would never wear again. As a matter of fact he never did. The poor chap was travelling along Swanston street in a cable car a month later when a gust of wind blew off his hat. With a cry like that of a wounded animal, he leaped straight off the car, at right angles, and crashed on the roadway. He received concussion of the brain, and although he is still alive he is never likely to wear a hat again. He has his two best hats hanging on his bed posts, where he can see them. , Apart from hats my ex-fellow lodger was quite normal and happy. He threw out his old trousers and boots often before they were quite worn out. There was a dear old maiden lady who let a portion of her House to friends whom I was accustomed to visit. She kept fowls, and kept them well. Also she kept umbrellas. When that old lady died, which was not very long ago, there was found stored in a libtle back lumber room no fewer than 36 old umbrellas. The old girl simply aould not part with them. They represented an entire lifetime's accumulation of that particular article. As she got each new umbrella she put the old one away with the feeling that it "might be useful some day." • ' ■■ •■ •- ■ " One of the most generous men 1 know is a dreadful miser about cigarettes. He will give you anything almost you ask him for. He will even sometimes give you a cigarette, though in a manner and with an expression of countenance that precludes you repeating the- torture within the next decade, by seoking to "borrow another "fag" from him. I have known that man shout seven or eight friends drink several times in an hojel. and the next minute lie to a friend about having smoked his ln«t cigarette, when his cigarette case contained half a .dozen fragrant weeds. Furniture misers are almost as com-^ mon as shells on the beach. Hundreds of houses in Victorian towns are stacked to the proverbial ceiling this day with old furniture that the owners^ simply cannot bear to part with. Not, in many cases, that it has any peculiar associations for them. They simply hoard it, exactly as a miser hoards his gold, until, with each new article purchased, the house becomes more and more congested, and there is scarcely elbow room anywhere from drawing-room to scullery. Usually i the death of the furniture miser is followed by an auction sale, the surviving relatives seizing the opportunity of getting rid of "all the old rubbish."

1 Avarice is much the same quality as the hoarding propensity of the miser. Many men and women who live moderately well are misers, in so far as they spend very considerably short 'of their spending power. These people, who can afford to live well, live only moderately well, because they cannot bring themselves, to devote their wealth to the buying of anything that is really not a necessity. The wife buys the cheapest sauce and tea. The husband Brookes the cheapest cigars. They look out upon the world of their more extravagant brothers and sisters, marvelling at the seeming wealth that is lavished an motorcars and fine dresses and concert parties, hardly grasping the truth that many of these so-called wealthy people, who seem to find such a zest in life, are wealthy in spirit and comparatively poor in goods. Many of the type "can't spend it" misers die intestate, leaving unknown nieces and nephews and fortysecond cousins to wrangle over their estate, or they bequeath in one fejl swoop their unspent wealth to some abandoned relative who "blows it up" as in an even feller swoop still.

I am no advocate of extravagance, nor a lover of the spendthrift, but 1 there is. I think, a happy medium between extravagance and meanness. I know of a family—a typkal one— whose respected heads insist that the children shall put every penny they earn, or are given, into thair money boxes. I found this excessive saving habit and the children's thankless gloom at the offering of monetary gifts so depressing that I abandoned altogether my occasional practice of giving them pennies, and took with me on occasion a pound or two of Jonathan apples or the choicest slipstone paaches. The change in the juvenile welcome of me that followed this discerning change in my visitation offertory was astounding and affecting, i _ Money is intended, within reason, for spending. It is a medium of exchange. Thrift is very desirable, if : not pushed too far.

The most admirable and satisfactory arrangement for children it have met with is one that is practised by a parent, whose professed desire is that his children shall develop into neither spendthrifts nor misers. He allows them to spend, if they desire, one-hivlf of what they are given or they earn. Thus he encourages thrift and a reasonable habit of spending at the same thne, always maintaining a scrutiny over the spending part of the business, tactfully criticising bad spending and praising good. The last time I met those kids the little girls had devoted half their jvy^k's in,'

conte to the purchase of decorative beads for dolls' dresses, while the boy had completed the accumuation of sufficient lucre —half of several weeks'. pin money from his squabs—for the purchase of another toy mechanical building set. What is sown in childhood and youth usually comes out afresh in old age. While avarice is mainly the vice of declining years, and real misers are mainly elderly people, the seed of both qualities is, I feei sure, often sown in a too rigid, unreasoning and objectiveless enforcement of. so-called thrift in childhood.