Excerpt from How a Lady, Having Lost a Sufficient Income From Government Bonds: By Misplaced Confidence, Reduced to a Little Homestead Whose Entire Income Is but $40; 00 Per Annum You will hardly dissent if I say it would be easier to tell how to die on five cents a day than how to live on that sum; perhaps I should say exist, rather than live. It is keeping soul and body together on a small annuity, and I may say in the outset that to live on half a dime a day will prove an infallible "anti-fat" remedy. All the patent bottles advertised to prevent obesity will have to point heads down, and beat a retreat to "Coventry" before this bill of fare. But I must admit that five cents, as a rule, only buys the food of a day, and other things than victuals are needed to enable a person to support life. There must be a place to live in, certainly: there must be clothing, and fire in cold weather. I had an old house and some land. I got twenty dollars for grass, twelve for pasturing; in good years, three for apples. There was no work I could do owing to a crippled arm and blinded eye, save knitting and making mock flowers. The utmost I could ever earn in a year was fifteen dollars. Here, then, was exactly fifty dollars, from which ten must be deducted for taxes. With the remaining forty I was not only to make "both ends meet," but all ends meet, and twist into a neatly knotted skein, as my frugal gift to each succeeding New Year. Three years my "offering" has been made. I have "got round" on the forty dollars. It has been accomplished through contrivance, self-denial, and arithmetic. You have heard of the man who "awoke one morning and found himself famous." About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.