$50.00 Five years averaging $50 each year...

$250.00 -- ----- $530.00 The rest was "Mother's labor", averaging twenty full days a year at $2 a day, $40 a year.

For fifteen years, $600.00.

Mother's labor--on one child's, clothes--footing up to $600.00.

It looked strange to see cash value attached to that unfailing source of family comfort and advantage.
The school expenses puzzled him a bit, for she had only gone to public schools; but she was counting books and slates and even pencils--it brought up evenings long passed by, the sewing wife, the studying children, the "Say, Father, I've got to have a new slate--mine's broke!" "Broken, Dina," her Mother would gently correct, while he demanded, "How did you break it ?" and scolded her for her careless tomboy ways.
Slates--three, $1.50--they were all down.