The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking | Page 6

with wood
and kindling and all household necessities.
To-day, with the old service done away with once for all, and with a set
of new conditions governing every form of work, the Southern woman
faces difficulties to which her Northern or Western sister is an utter
stranger; faces them often with a patience and dignity beyond all praise,
but still with a hopelessness of better things, the necessary fruit of
ignorance. Old things are passed away, and the new order is yet too
unfamiliar for rules to have formulated and settled in any routine of
action. While there is, at the North, more intuitive and inherited sense
of how things should be done, there is on many points an almost equal
ignorance, more especially among the cultivated classes, who, more
than at any period of woman's history, are at the mercy of their servants.
Every science is learned but domestic science. The schools ignore it;
and, indeed, in the rush toward an early graduation, there is small room
for it.
"She can learn at home," say the mothers. "She will take to it when her
time comes, just as a duck takes to water," add the fathers; and the
matter is thus dismissed as settled.
In the mean time the "she" referred to--the average daughter of average
parents in both city and country--neither "learns at home," nor "takes to
it naturally," save in exceptional cases; and the reason for this is found
in the love, which, like much of the love given, is really only a higher
form of selfishness. The busy mother of a family, who has fought her
own way to fairly successful administration, longs to spare her
daughters the petty cares, the anxious planning, that have helped to eat
out her own youth; and so the young girl enters married life with a

vague sense of the dinners that must be, and a general belief that
somehow or other they come of themselves. And so with all household
labor. That to perform it successfully and skillfully, demands not only
training, but the best powers one can bring to bear upon its
accomplishment, seldom enters the mind; and the student, who has
ended her course of chemistry or physiology enthusiastically, never
dreams of applying either to every-day life.
This may seem a digression; and yet, in the very outset, it is necessary
to place this work upon the right footing, and to impress with all
possible earnestness the fact, that Household Science holds every other
science in tribute, and that only that home which starts with this
admission and builds upon the best foundation the best that thought can
furnish, has any right to the name of "home." The swarms of drunkards,
of idiots, of insane, of deaf and dumb, owe their existence to an
ignorance of the laws of right living, which is simply criminal, and for
which we must be judged; and no word can be too earnest, which opens
the young girl's eyes to the fact that in her hands lie not alone her own
or her husband's future, but the future of the nation. It is hard to see
beyond one's own circle; but if light is sought for, and there is steady
resolve and patient effort to do the best for one's individual self, and
those nearest one, it will be found that the shadow passes, and that
progress is an appreciable thing.
Begin in your own home. Study to make it not only beautiful, but
perfectly appointed. If your own hands must do the work, learn every
method of economizing time and strength. If you have servants,
whether one or more, let the same laws rule. It is not easy, I admit; no
good thing is: but there is infinite reward for every effort. Let no failure
discourage, but let each one be only a fresh round in the ladder all must
climb who would do worthy work; and be sure that the end will reward
all pain, all self-sacrifice, and make you truly the mistresses of the
home for which every woman naturally and rightfully hopes, but which
is never truly hers till every shade of detail in its administration has
been mastered.
The house, then, is the first element of home to be considered and

studied; and we have settled certain points as to location and
arrangement. This is no hand-book of plans for houses, that ground
being thoroughly covered in various books,--the titles of two or three of
which are given in a list of reference-books at the end. But, whether
you build or buy, see to it that your kitchens and working-rooms are
well lighted, well aired, and of good size, and that in the arrangement
of the kitchen especially, the utmost convenience becomes the chief
end. Let sink, pantries,