“One cigar a day!” said Judge Boompointer.
“One cigar a day!” repeated John Jenkins, as with trepidation he dropped his half-consumed cigar under his work-bench.
“One cigar a day is three cents a day,” remarked Judge Boompointer gravely; “and do you know, sir, what one cigar a day, or three cents a day, amounts to in the course of four years?”
John Jenkins, in his boyhood, had attended the village school, and possessed considerable arithmetical ability. Taking up a shingle which lay upon his work-bench, and producing a piece of chalk, with a feeling of conscious pride he made an exhaustive calculation.
“Exactly forty-three dollars and eighty cents,” he replied, wiping the perspiration from his heated brow, while his face flushed with honest enthusiasm.
“Well, sir, if you saved three cents a day, instead of wasting it, you would now be the possessor of a new suit of clothes, an illustrated Family Bible, a pew in the church, a complete set of Patent Office Reports, a hymnbook, and a paid subscription to ‘Arthur’s Home Magazine,’ which could be purchased for exactly forty-three dollars and eighty cents; and,” added the Judge, with increasing sternness, “if you calculate leap-year, which you seem to have strangely omitted, you have three cents more, sir—three cents more! What would that buy you, sir?”
“A cigar,” suggested John Jenkins; but, coloring again deeply, he hid his face.
“No, sir,” said the Judge, with a sweet smile of benevolence stealing over his stern features; “properly invested, it would buy you that which passeth all price. Dropped into the missionary-box, who can tell what heathen, now idly and joyously wantoning in nakedness and sin, might be brought to a sense of his miserable condition, and made, through that three cents, to feel the torments of the wicked?”
With these words the Judge retired, leaving John Jenkins buried in profound thought. “Three cents a day,” he muttered. “In forty years I might be worth four hundred and thirty-eight dollars and ten cents,—and then I might marry Mary. Ah, Mary!” The young carpenter sighed, and drawing a twenty-five cent daguerreotype from his vest-pocket, gazed long and fervidly upon the features of a young girl in book muslin and a coral necklace. Then, with a resolute expression, he carefully locked the door of his work-shop, and departed.
Alas! his good resolutions were too late. We trifle with the tide of fortune, which too often nips us in the bud and casts the dark shadow of misfortune over the bright lexicon of youth! That night the half-consumed fragment of John Jenkins’s cigar set fire to his work-shop and burned it up, together with all his tools and materials. There was no insurance.
All books are sourced from Project Gutenberg