You dropped your stick into the river yesterday, and it floated away.

You were sorry, because it had cost you a great deal of trouble to cut it, and peel it, and carve a head and your name on it.
Madam How was not sorry, though she had taken a great deal more trouble with that stick than ever you had taken.

She had been three years making that stick, out of many things, sunbeams among the rest.

But when it fell into the river, Madam How knew that she should not lose her sunbeams nor anything else: the stick would float down the river, and on into the sea; and there, when it got heavy with the salt water, it would sink, and lodge, and be buried, and perhaps ages hence turn into coal; and ages after that some one would dig it up and burn it, and then out would come, as bright warm flame, all the sunbeams that were stored away in that stick: and so Madam How would have her own again.

And if that should not be the fate of your stick, still something else will happen to it just as useful in the long run; for Madam How never loses anything, but uses up all her scraps and odds and ends somehow, somewhere, somewhen, as is fit and proper for the Housekeeper of the whole Universe.