We (in the greek/latin) based world write text from left to right. The arab numbers are right to left (49 starts with a 9 and has, due to its size, an additional digit left to it). That's a weird convention, but you learned it rather early and there is no plan to change it.
I feel it very natural, to store texts with the first character in the first memory location and numbers with the LSB first. ( However, regarding numbers --where you know the size in memory in advance--, I admit that Big Endian is a possible way to do it (the wrong way 
)