"A thousand dollars has slipped through my fingers already this week. At the commissaries I spent five hundred today for sugar, candles, a lamp, &c. Tallow candles are bad enough, but of them there seems to be an end, too. Now we are restricted to smoky terebene lamps—terrabene is a preparation of turpentine. When the chimney of the lamp cracks, as crack it will, we plaster up the place with paper, thick letter paper, preferring the highly glazed kind. In that hunt queer old letters come to light.
No wonder Mr Peterkin said our provisions could be carried in a porte-monnaie, and our money to buy them required a market basket to hold it. If you could see the pitiful little bundles this five hundred dollars bought. . . ."
