A USEFUL WIFE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume V, Issue 261, 3 May 1878, Page 17

A USEFUL WIFE.

They had been out to the graveyard to bury Mis. Pidgeon, and were riding home in the carriage with the bereaved widower. While he flopped his eyes with his handkerchief he told about her :—: — "In one respect I never saw her equal. Sue was a manager. I've knowed that woman that's lying out there in the tomb, to take an old pair of my trousers and cut them up for the boys. She'd make a splendid suit for both of them out of them old pants, and a cap for Jonny, and have some left over for a rag carpet, besides making handkerchiefs out of the pockets. Give her any old garment and it was as good as a gold mine. Why, she'd take an old sock and make a good overcoat out of it, I believe. She had a turn for that kind of economy. There's one of my sbirts that I bought in 1874 still going about making itself useful as window curtains and plenty of other tilings. Only last June our gridiron gave out and she took it apart, and in two hours it was rigged on the side >of the house as .a splendid lightning rod, all except what she had made into a poker and icepick. Ingenious .' "Why, she Jkcpt.tbe family in buttons and whistles out of the ham bones that she saved, and she made fifteen princely chicken-coops out of her old hoop-skirts, and a pig pen out of her used up corset bones. She never wasted a solitary thing. Let a cat die around the louse and the first thing you know, Mary Jan'e'd have a new muff and a set of furs, and I'd begin to find mince vies on the dinner table. She'd stuff a feather bed with the feathers she got oft one little bit of a rooster, and she'd even utilise the roaches in/ the kitchen so 'they'd run the churn— had a machine she made for, that purpose. I've seen her cook'potatoe parings so you'd think they were canvas-back duck, and she had a way of doctoring up shavings that the pig would eat them and grow fat on them: I believe she could bm ld a four story hotel if you'd give her a single pine-board ; or a steamboat ,out of a washboiler ; and the very last thing she said to me was to bury her out in the garden, so she would be useful down below there, to help shove up the cabbages. " I'll never see her like again. — American paper.