The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1879-06-07 00:00:00

TWO
.W'S OF WAR.

When Wolseley's mentioned, Wellesley's brought to mind;
Two men, two names, of answerable kind.
Called to the front like Wellesley, good at need,
Go, Wolseley, and like Wellesley, greatly speed !—Punoh.

A NEW YORK "KITCHEN-GARTEN."
(From the Pati MaU Gaziefe).

In no part of the world are domestics more highly
paid, and nowhere are there more inefficient servants,
than in New York. Though the Irish slatterns who
successfully disputed kitchen rule with their mistresses
are disappearing, trim Teutons are not sufficiently
numerous to oust them as yet; and the native Ameri-
can "miss" still clings to machine work in the factories,
I shrill choruses of revival hymns and popular songs in
which resound along even so busy a thoroughfare as
Canal-street, high above the clatter of Wheeler and
Wilson's stitchers and the hum of traffic. Married
and housekeepers, they pay the penalty of their
ignorance of household management by in turn ex-
periencing the miseries of Irish " helps," making
home miserable by spasmodic personal exertions to do
those "chorea which in England are quietly
and deftly performed by such as are to the man-
ner born. At last a fusion has taken place
between some of the upper ten, tired of lament-
ing their servants' inefficiency, and some of
the more energetic pioneers of social reforms; and
a beginning has just been made of systematised
plans for servant-rearing and instructing children in
what will hereafter be of almost hourly use The
founders of the scheme are Miss Emily Huntington,
' Miss Grace H. Dodge and Mr. 'W. L. Brace, the lat-
ter of whom informed the writer that one housemaid,
to his knowledge, laid up 100 dollars a year, and had
nearly £2OO thus saved in the bank. The first experi-
ment was made atahe Phelps School of the Children's
Aid Society, New York, where some forty girls are
under tuition. A class ranging from eight to twelve
years of age marched in, and assembled at a kinder-
garten table, laid off into small squarer. After a little
talk by Miss Dodge on wood and its properties, which
elicited from the class that "matches are not to be
struck on the wall, and to be kept in a box," each was
furnished with a scrubbing-brush, and set to work
singing and moving in unison to a scrubbing-brush
song. Then a bundle of four white and four coloured
sticks was given to each to set as knives and forks for
a party of four to a recitative of "Knives to right,
forks to left, all perfectly straight," &c. Each then
folded a square of paper like a napkin. At a signal
from the piano each opened a bex of toy dishes, and
arranged them on little round boards to the song :
When I was very little, I used to sit and think
How hard mother had to work, until my heart would sink;
I tried to linip her as I could, but always did it wrong,
Which only made the matter worse, and her own work more
long.
So then I went to school,
Where we were taught by rule
How to set the table, how to lay the tires,
How to make a cup of tea, the cup that never tires;
How to wash the dishes, and keep the kitchen neat,
How quietly and gently to move and speak.

As each article was put on the table it was named by
each child: "This is the coffee-pot; always scald it
before the coffee is put in. These are the breakfast
plates; have hot ones for the steak, and cold ones for
the bread." Dinner was served in miniature for three
courses, and a pan given to each child, who was taught
how the glasses and silver were washed before other
articles of greasy nature; as before, the teaching
being embodied in a song. A little girl next gave a
lesson in bedmaking, illustrating the answers, as to
disposing the under-sbeet right side up and the upper
right side down, with the dapper pride of a scientific
professor when his batteries work well on a wet night.
Then came a lesson in washing, in the course of which
the table linen, the fine clothes, the coarse things,
and the towels were manipulated in due order—the
washboard not being used for the best, the water
changed for some, and some boiled; there was a talk
about rinsing, blueing, and starching; the articles
were hung out to dry on a stout twine line and fast-
ened up by little clothes pins, to be stripped in a
twinkling when a note on the piano warned that a
shower was coming on, Then, after an exercise in
sweeping, there was an interval for recreation, when
the children played "Lady come to see ''—to learn how
visitors should be received. A circle was formed, and
a girl with a bell walked outside it; while the others
sang a chorus, the last line of which referred to "the
very little girl, who is learning to wait at the door."
At the last word the bell rang; the child next it
turned to faire the singer, who inquired for an imagin-
ary triend, was courteously shown to an imaginary
parlour—and so the game went on.
Miss Emily Huntington has now under her charge
250 children, whom she proposes to train in house.
work. At first she tried to teach four at a time in a
real kitchen, where they were an annoyance to the
servant-girls and always in the way. But the idea of
extending the kinder-garten system to housework
struAr her. Friends came forward with toys and
suggestions. The children enjoy the singing and the
work as much as they do their dolls—more, possibly—
and learn at the same ,time to be both useful and
polite. A full conviction that the rising genera
tion must be educated by labour as well as
study, and that under a regular system of
organized play and work children si.ould learn to use
their hands and limbs and minds in a way to prepare
them to use them profitably and joyously.in the work of
life, is gradually pos-essing the minds of the super-
intendents of national education here. Technical
schools are certain to be adjuncts of the primary and
normal schools of the Eastern States in a very few
years—Henry Ward Beecher endorsing a plea on their
behalf by Gail Hamilton in his ipse diait fashion, with
the apophthegm, "Nothing is too good for the com-
mon people."