Mrs. L. N Monmolth
and How She Lived on Forty Dollars a Year.

Here is a true tale of a lady, still living among us, who rescued her home, her life, her happiness, and her dignity as a gentlewoman, from an abyss of circumstances that threatened to engulf them all. She is that Mrs. L. H. Monmouth, of Canterbury, New Hampshire, of whom the reader may have casually heard, who in middle age, half disabled, and an invalid, suddenly lost her fortune. She had been living in comfort and apparent security in the receipt of a modest, but sufficient income, much of which she spent in charity. She awoke one morning and found herself without a dollar—everything gone but the old homestead that sheltered her.

Too ill to work, afflicted with a crippled arm and one blind eye, and dazed by the suddenness of her misfortune, she was at her wits' end to know what to do. In this emergency, friends were not backward in offering their advice.

"Take boarders," said one.

" Sell your place and buy a cottage," said another. 

"Let it, and hire your board," said a third.

Others, perhaps as well-meaning, but even less practical, counseled her to be resigned, to rely on Providence, to trust and pray. A few added the vague though kindly phrase:

When you want anything, be sure and let us know."

If these various suggestions were of ally assistance to Mrs. Monmouth in her trouble, it was only in showing her that she must think and net for herself. Take boarders she would not, on account of her health. Her house, if she sold it, would not bring more than six hundred 
dollars, a sum too small for the purchase of a cottage, and which, if used for paying board, would soon have slipped away and left her dependent upon charity.

She did not enter upon this desperate experiment without serious misgivings. Her first thought was to assign twenty dollars out of the precious forty for food, but this sum she soon reduced to seventeen. Better starve the body than the mind, she thought, and the three dollars thus saved were used to continue her subscription to her favorite weekly newspaper. She did better even than this; for in her final apportionment of expenditures we find ten dollars—one-quarter of her whole income exclusive of taxes—set apart for the purchase of reading matter; the only other item in the list, besides food, being thirteen dollars for fuel.

Not a single penny did she devote to dress, and the ingenious shifts by which she succeeded in clothing herself respectably and sufficiently upon nothing a year, for three years, are worthy of study, and cannot fail to excite admiration. Her wardrobe, at the time of her loss of fortune, contained but one suit in really good condition, and but one outer garment of any kind, a waterproof cloak much worn and defaced. But she possessed a palm-figured dressing-gown lined with purple flannel. the outside of which was soiled and torn, while the lining was still quite good. This she ripped to pieces, and, after washing and ironing the flannel, made a new gown from it which she trimmed with the palm-leaf figures cut from the sound parts of the other material, and placed in three bands round the skirt and sleeves. She then raveled out an old red undersleeve and edged each band with a narrow fluting made from the worsted thus obtained.

"I took genuine comfort," she tells us, "in planning and piecing it out, day after day, with half-mittens on my cold hands, sitting close to a cold fire. I was more than a week about it, for owing to shortness of firewood my days were very short, and my lame hand was decrepit and painful. I recollected that when I had made this wrapper out of an abundance of nice new materials I had been quite impatient at having to sew on it for two days, and called in help to finish it off. People who saw it after it was remodeled said it was handsomer than when it was new, and it is certain 1 thought a good deal more of it."

Even a Yankee woman might well be proud of such a triumph ; but it was by no means the greatest which this undaunted lady achieved. She had now two dresses, but an outside garment was necessary, since the waterproof was quite unpresentable. In an outer room of the house 
hung an old, rusty overcoat of her father. It had been there undisturbed for fifteen years, in company with a pair of big boots, partly through an affectionate liking of hers to see it around, partly as a wholesome suggestion to tramps of a possible masculine protector. It was 
destined now to resume a more active career of usefulness. With great difficulty Mrs. Monmouth lifted it from its peg and dragged it to her room to examine at her ease.

It proved a mine of wealth to her. The lining alone, of the finest and glossiest black lasting, quilted in diamonds, was a great treasure; then, when this had been ripped away, the reverse side of the coat itself was revealed to be dark gray, clean, whole, and as good as new.

With this gray cloth cut in strips, the old waterproof newly washed, pressed, and mended, was so trimmed and pieced as to make a very respectable garment for winter service. Better still, the same stuff—a kind of fulled cloth—was so thick, warm, and pliable that Mrs. Monmouth, after having ripped up an old shoe for a pattern, was enabled to make herself an excellent pair of shoes out of it, comfortable, neatly fitting, and not unsightly.

"These home made shoes," she says with pardonable pride, "shut off the shoe bill at the store, and gave me Harper's Magazine."

But let us not forget the quilted lining. From this, long, shining, and almost exactly of the fashionable shape, a cloak was made which, when lined and trimmed with a few odds and ends of cashmere, proved so handsome and at a little distance so like satin, that its skillful and modest owner dared not wear it much abroad, for fear of being accused of wild extravagance. It was reserved to put on in the house on very cold days, and on Thanksgivings, "to give thanks in." 

From some plaid black and white flannel which had lined the waterproof before its renovation, another cloak was made, less elegant, but still, when decorated with pressed grosgrain ribbon, and a fluting and ball-fringe made from a pair of raveled stockings, it was an article of apparel by no means to be despised. This served for use in spring and fall.

The problem of shoes had been mainly solved by the discovery of the old overcoat, although. to spare any unnecessary use of objects so difficult to manufacture, the soles of old rubbers, lined with flannel and laced sandalwise upon the feet, often answered for household wear. The problem of stockings remained. It was finally solved by means of a knitted shawl and some ancient homespun underclothes, all of which had been long since cast aside. They were a mass of ends and ravelings, but the yarn, though torn and in a few places moth-eaten, was other-wise quite sound and very strong. This was carefully washed, wound into skeins, colored, rinsed, and rewound into balls for knitting—a labor of weeks. When it was completed Mrs. Monmouth found herself supplied with sufficient material to afford stockings for a lifetime.

Her summer clothing gave less trouble than the heavier garments required for winter. She was fortunate enough to find an old chocolate and white print gown of her mother's, which merely demanded altering over. A second dress—a very pretty one, was made from a bedticking, and trimmed with blue drilling taken from a hair of overalls left on the place by some careless workman, years before. A pair of checkered table-cloths were held in reserve to be used should occasion require. Linen articles were supplied from fifteen mottoes, worked upon muslin and cotton flannel, that the house contained.  These were soaked and boiled clean before being used. Hats and bonnets were deemed superfluous. When, however, it was necessary to pass the limits of the little farm and appear in public, a battered straw ruin from the attic fulfilled the demands of propriety, its forlorn condition being concealed beneath the folds of a barege veil.

In the matter of food Mrs. Monmouth relied much upon corn meal. Four and a half cents would support her very well for a day and a half ; one cent for a quarter of a pound of meal, one and a half for a quarter of a pound of dried beans; and two for a bit of salt pork. This was her customary bill of fare for three days out of the seven.  Rice she made great use of, and a pound of oatmeal cooked on Monday served as a dessert throughout the  week, a cup of molasses taking the place of sauce. Occasionally, when they were at their cheapest, she bought several eggs ; at rare intervals she even indulged herself with a beet, a turnip, or a few cents worth of butcher's scraps. Once a month she luxuriated in baking gingerbread or frying doughnuts, one at a time, over her little oil stove.

"I always enjoyed the frying of doughnuts," she says, "and looked forward to it with a zest of anticipation; they generally came up plump and round, and quite filled the little cup of boiling lard. I picked them out with a fork and invariably ate the first while the second was cooking. After that I let them congregate upon a plate, and watched their numbers increase to five, six, seven—never more than that."

Now and then she was haunted by visions of the savory cakes and pies baking in her neighbors' ovens ; but whenever the contrast became too strong between these fancied delicacies and the lonely pot of oatmeal in her own cupboard, she hastened to forget her deprivations in a book.

Her usual provision of winter fuel was three cords of wood, which she sawed herself, despite her lame arm, worrying off," as she expresses it, "a few sticks each day." During the milder seasons of the year she burned only such dried moss, branches, and pine cones as she could gather in the neighborhood. For almost all cooking she used an oil stove. Her lame arm, which was easily affected by the weather, became almost useless during periods of intense cold. At these times, feeling that when nothing could be earned something might at least be saved, she would spare her fuel by creeping into bed with a book and a hot freestone, and spend the day beneath the clothes.

She had no money to spare for incidental expenses. When the roof of her shed let in too much rain upon the wood-pile, the wood-pile was moved to a drier spot. When a front window was ruined by some reckless sportsman putting thirty shot holes through it, the blinds were closed and it was left unmended. When the plaster dropped down into the rooms its place was supplied by patches of cloth pasted over the bare brown laths. Yet, while her poverty reduced her to such makeshifts as these, while she denied herself even the lotion which would alleviate the condition of her crippled arm, Mrs. Monmouth always managed to keep a dollar or two on hand for charitable purposes, and never failed to manufacture some simple Christmas presents for a few children and faithful friends who were accustomed to bring her occasionally during the year what she gratefully terms " baskets of benefaction."  She succeeded, moreover, in finding time and strength to render pleasing and attractive the old home which she could not afford to repair, and which became, in the course of a few years; a veritable museum of ingenious and beautiful handiwork. At last the people around her became interested ; the place began to be talked of, and its fame spread into the neighboring towns. Visitors arrived, few at first, and later in such numbers that Mrs. Monmouth was obliged to charge an admittance fee, and afterwards to issue a. circular containing prices and regulations.

"Children, seven cents ; Ladies, ten; Gentlemen, fifteen;" says this interesting little document, adding that "No gentlemen unaccompanied by ladies will be admitted, and strangers must bring an introduction."

It also states, very prudently, that "Ladies are requested not to come with horses they cannot manage. Such as wish to remain most of the day can do so by bringing lunch and paying twenty-five cents."

Besides her other labors, Mrs. Monmouth has written  a small pamphlet relating her experiences, which she entitles, " Living on Half a Dime a Day."

Let no one undervalue these trifling details, for they convey to this extravagant age a lesson of which it stands in need. Some of the brightest spirits of our time have passed or are passing their lives in miserable bondage, solely through disregard of Mrs. Monmouth's principle of preserving her independence by living within her menus. An English poet of great celebrity has a costly mansion unfinished. which has for years made him a bond-slave to publishers and architects.

The French novelist, Balzae, as we see by his Letters, spent his life in a mere struggle to pay off enormous debts incurred in building, improving, and furnishing.  He was a man of almost unequaled strength of constitution, one who could work sixteen hours a day, for months at a time, without obvious exhaustion; but it killed him at last. The disease of which he died was called consumption, but its correct name was House and C rounds; and he seemed quite helpless in the clutch of this dread malady. When he began to write he used to receive for a small volume one hundred and twenty dollars, and the endeavored to write one of these every month. In the course of a year or two his price rose to four hundred dollars for a volume, which would have yielded him a tolerable income without excessive labor. But now, presuming upon his strength and ability, he began to get into debt, and, in six years, he owed twenty-five thousand dollars. From that time to the end of his life, he was possessed of two raging manias—a mania to get into debt, and a mania to work out of debt. But it is so easy to spend lie sometimes received five thousand dollars a month for literary labor, and sold one story to a newspaper for four thousand dollars. Rising from his bed at midnight, he kept at work all the rest of the night, and most of the next day, till five in the afternoon ; but his debts grew apace and speedily reached a total of fifty thousand dollars.

Then, of course, he must needs buy a house and set about improving its garden. He appears not to have known what was the matter. Ile wondered that he should be so pestered with debts. " Why am I in debt he asks. lie died insolvent, after making millions by his pen, and at the very moment almost of his death he was buying an antique costume for thirty thousand francs, and concluding bargains for pictures and ancient needlework.

There is an interesting passage in the memoirs of George Ticknor, where he speaks of his two visits to Abbotsford, the big house that brought low the magnificent head of Sir Walter Scott. When Mr. Ticknor first visited the author of "Marmion," his abode was a modest, comfortable establishment, quite sufficient for a reasonable family of liberal income. When he paid his second visit, Sir Walter having in the interval made and lost a great fortune, Abbotsford had grown into a costly, extensive, nondescript, preposterous mansion. The moment his eyes fell upon it he understood Sir Walter's ruin. That toy house was his ruin. The American visitor discovered among its grandeurs the apartment he had occupied twenty years before, reduced in rank and office, but still recognizable, and he could not but lament the fatal mania which had lured so great a man to spoil a modest country house by incrusting it over with an eccentric, tawdry palace.

A leaf from Mrs. Monmouth's book might have saved these men from misery and despair. She made the most of small means, and they made the least of large. In the midst of poverty she preserved her independence and her dignity ; with superabundant means, they threw both away.
  

Related:

• Stowe Surname Genealogy Resources
• Search for Ancestors
• Biographies Online

Daughters of Genius