Under Orders

"THE situation certainly looks desperate, Anna," said Mr. Manning, with a deep sigh, as he turned wearily on his couch and reached out a thin white hand that was immediately clasped between the plump ones of his cheery-faced wife. Her face did not look so very cheery just at this moment, however, for lines of anxiety were wrinkling her forehead and her eyes were full of tears. Then, too, she was thinking so hard that her mouth was all puckered up. "Yes, it does look a little desperate," she admitted; "but, bless you it has looked desperate plenty of times before, and we have always come out all right somehow. God has been too good to us so far to desert us now, and I, for one, am willing to trust him to the end." "Well, dear," answered her husband, "if you are, I ought to be, for the heaviest part of the burden must fall on you." The Mannings lived in a pleasant, old-fashioned New Jersey village a few miles out of New York, and had, until recently, been in the most comfortable circumstances. Mr. Manning was the manager of a large manufacturing business and received a handsome salary, from which he should have laid by a snug sum against a "rainy day." He knew it was his duty to do this; but each year brought some new expense that seemed as if it ought to be met, and each year he said to himself: "Well, I can't do any thing about it this time, that's certain; but next year I must surely begin to lay something aside." So year after year passed, until finally, when Myles Manning, the only son of the family, was ready to enter college, the annual expenses were found to be in excess of the handsome annual income, and nothing had been saved.