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

linen shelves be the especial charge of some one particular keeper. If not yourself, one of your daughters. This is rendered almost necessary by the system of rotation that should regulate the use of sheets, pillow-cases, counterpanes and towels. Those which come from the wash this week should be kept by themselves. In laying out clothes for the beds, and towels for the various rooms, select from the bottom of the pile of those laundered one, two or four weeks ago, working gradually upward, week by week, until all have gone through the wash and consequently, all are evenly worn. Never make up a bed with freshly washed linen, no matter how well aired it may seem to be. Sheets, pillow-cases, towels, table-cloths—all folded linens—should be laid upon the shelves with the open and hemmed ends toward the wall, the round folds outward. The effect is neater to the eye, and articles are more easily taken out. There should be no smell in this airy closet except the indescribable sweet sense of freshly laundered linen—not strong enough to be called an odor. Lavender, scented grasses, and dried rose leaves are poetical in the writing and the hearing thereof, but the sleeper between smooth cotton or linen sheets sickens of artificial smells. They are neither “goodly,” nor wholesome. THE CHILDREN Our forefathers and foremothers were dressed, in infancy, precisely like their fathers and mothers. As we see by the portraits treasured among our curios, they were abridged copies of the adults of a hundred years ago. Parents were then consistent in feeding their progeny with food they considered convenient for themselves. When the royal father ate fermenty for breakfast it is upon record that a baby prince, suffering from marasmus, was nourished (!) upon barley, boiled soft with raisins. They sat up to late functions—those wretchedly dissipated princelings—and the cotter’s children went to bed at the same time with himself. He who doubts whether or not our times are better than the former would be converted to steadfastness of conviction by patient study of the nursery habits of the late eighteenth