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

and early nineteenth centuries. We have children’s outfitters nowadays, who fashion garments utterly unlike those worn by be-corseted, be-trained, and be-pantalooned grown people. The cotter’s wife clothes her boys in knickerbockers and blouses, her girls in loose waists and brief skirts, all designed expressly—although she does not know it—to allow free and healthful growth of the immature creatures. I wish I could add that reform as radical and commonsensible had been wrought in children’s diet, and children’s hours of rest and sleep. Mothers who have thought deeply upon these matters and acted upon meditation, appreciate the hygienic law that children require sleep to promote growth, as well as to repair the waste of waking—which are working—hours. If an adult needs seven hours’ slumber, the infant of days—under seven years of age—requires ten to satisfy wants his senior has outgrown. Up to the age when the child ceases to add inches, if not cubits, to his stature yearly, provision must be made for the steady drain upon vital and nerve forces. The aforesaid canny mothers call in the little ones from play before sundown in summer, bathe them, endue them in nightgowns and pajamas, put dressing-gowns over these, and loose slippers upon the tired feet, then set them down to a supper of bread and milk, or buttered bread with a dash of jam or jelly, and good, sweet milk, with once in a while a plain cooky as an afterthought. Supper over and prayers said, the darlings are laid in bed by the time the west begins to blush at the sun’s nearer approach. In winter, the six o’clock supper is served in the nursery or dining-room, and the bairnies disposed of comfortably to themselves and to the rest of the household before “grown-uppers” sit down to the “hearty” supper or dinner dividing the working day from an evening as busy, and sometimes almost as long. To borrow from the slang dictionary—the child needs the ten or twelve hours’ sleep in his business of growing tall and robust, steady of nerve and sane of mind. Furthermore, he needs food adapted