This I call waste and wicked prodigality. Life is too short
to permit us to fret about matters of no importance. Where
these things can minister to the mind and heart, they are a
part of the soul's furniture; but where they only pamper the
appetite or the vanity, or any foolish and hurtful lust, they
are foolish and hurtful. Be thrifty of comfort. Never allow
an opportunity for cheer, for pleasure, for intelligence, for
benevolence, for kind of good, to go unimproved. Consider
seriously whether the syrup of your preserves or juices of your
own soul will do the most to serve your race. It may be that
they are compatible,--that the concoction of the one shall
provide the ascending sap of the other; but if it is not so,
if one must be sacrificed, do not hesitate a moment as to which
it shall be. If a peach does not become sweetmeat, it will
become something, it will not stay a withered, unsightly peach;
but for souls there is no transmigration out of fables. Once
a soul, forever a soul,--mean or mighty, shrivelled or full,
it is for you to say. Money, land, luxury, so far as they are
money, land, and luxury, are worthless. It is only as fast and
as far as they are turned into life that they acquire value.

So you are thriftless when you eagerly seize the first
opportunity to fritter away your time over old clothes. You
precipitate yourself unnecessarily against a disagreeable
thing. For you are not going to put your stockings on.
Perhaps you will not need your buttons for a week, and in a
week you may have passed beyond the jurisdiction of buttons.
But even if you should not, let the buttons and the holes alone
all the same. For, first, the pleasant and profitable thing
which you will do instead is a funded capital, which will roll