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Jacob Jones; Or, The Man Who Couldn’t Get Along In The World
by
Clara was not unwilling, and Jacob Jones entered into the estate connubial, and took upon him the cares of a family, with a salary of seven hundred dollars a year, to sustain the new order of things. Instead of taking cheap boarding, or renting a couple of rooms, and commencing housekeeping in a small way, Jacob saw but one course before him, and that was to rent a genteel house, go in debt for genteel furniture, and keep two servants. Two years were the longest that he could bear up under this state of things, when he was sold out by the sheriff, and forced “to go through the mill again,” as taking the benefit of the insolvent law was facetiously called in the State where he resided.
“Poor fellow! he has a hard time of it. I wonder why it is that he gets along so badly. He is an industrious man and regular in his habits. It is strange. But some men seem born to ill-luck.”
So said some of his pitying friends. Others understood the matter better.
Ten years have passed, and Jacob is still a clerk, but not in a store. Hopeless of getting into business, he applied for a vacancy that occurred in an insurance company, and received the appointment, which he still holds at a salary of twelve hundred dollars a year. After being sold out three times by the sheriff, and having the deep mortification of seeing her husband brought down to the humiliating necessity of applying as often for the benefit of the insolvent law, Mrs. Jones took affairs, by consent of her husband, into her own hands, and managed them with such prudence and economy, that, notwithstanding they have five children, the expenses, all told, are not over eight hundred dollars a year, and half of the surplus, four hundred dollars, is appropriated to the liquidation of debts contracted since their marriage, and the other half deposited in the Savings Bank, as a fund for the education of their children in the higher branches, when they reach a more advanced age.
To this day it is a matter of wonder to Jacob Jones why he could never get along in the world like some people; and he has come to the settled conviction that it is his “luck.”