Marion Harland's Complete Cook Book: A Practical and Exhaustive Manual of Cookery and Housekeeping

experiment we are confident that—at last!—we have what we have been looking for lo! these many years. She is a shrewd house-mother who reserves judgment until the first awkward week or the crucial first month has brought out the staying power or proved the lack of it. Officious activity in unusual directions is a bad omen in the New Broom of Commerce. In sporting parlance, I at once “saw the finish” of one whom I found upon the second day of service with me washing a window in the cellar. She “couldn’t abide dirt nowhere,” she informed me, scrubbing vehemently at the dim panes. I had just passed through the kitchen where a grateful of fiery coals was heating the range plates to an angry glow. All the drafts were open; the boiler over the sink was at a bubbling roar; upon the tables was a litter of dirty plates and dishes; pots, pans and kettles filled the sink. It is well to have a care of the corners, but the weightier matters of the law of cleanliness are usually in full sight. I once knew a woman who, deliberately, and of purpose, changed servants every month. She said no new broom lasted more than four weeks, and when one became grubby and stumpy she got rid of it. Her house was the cleanest in town and her temper did not seem worse for friction. Another woman who, strange to tell, lived to be ninety years old, “liked moving” and never lived two years in one and the same house. She maintained that she kept clear of rubbish by frequent flittings, and enjoyed rubbing out and beginning again. Personally, I should have preferred a clean, lively conflagration every three years or so, but she throve upon nomadism. In minor details of housewifery, as in more important, make up your mind how you will manage the home and turn a deaf ear to gratuitous suggestions from people whose own households would be better conducted if their energies were concentrated. Let one example suffice: A so-called reformer felt herself called in (or