Wood County reporter. [volume] (Grand Rapids [i.e. Wisconsin Rapids], Wis.) 1857-1923, 1876-08-10
Hints to Girls Concerning House
keeping.

| DON I keep going to your mother.
You have every one of you probably
some little independence of money, or
some possibility of economizing it.
Buy your own utensils; set up your
| own establishment, if only by slow
degrees. You will know the good of
it then; and you will be setting up
your character at the same time.
| There will be no sudden violent reso-
luton and undertaking, which drafts
| aid and encouragement from every
body about you, getting up prospective
| virtue by subscription, and upSetting
half the current order of the household
for an uncertain experiment. Be in
earnest enough to make your own way,
and before you or anybody else thinks
about it, you will have become a rec
OgniZed force in the domestic commu-
nifty; you will have risen into your alti-
tude without assumption, just as you
you are growing, 10y Invisible na1r-
breadthS, into your wOmanly stature.
Then, some day, you may say your
mother: Let me have charge of the
china-closet and pantry, please" and
you may enter upon a new realm, hay
ing fairly conquered your own queen
dom. And l can tell you this new one
will be a pretty and pleasant realm to
queen in; an epitome of the
whole homework practiced in dainty,
easy little ways. Shelves to be kept
nice, wiped down with soft wet cloth
Wrung from the Suds that cups and
silver have come out bright from;
cups and silver, plates and dishes, to
be ranged III prettiest lines and piles
and groups on the fresh shelves, cup
boards to be regulated with light daily
touches and requirements; yesterdays
cake and cake-basket, fruit or Jelly,
custards or blanc-mange, to be over
looked and newly dished for the next
table-Setting; the nice remnant of
morning cream to be transferred to a
fresh jug and put in cool clean cor
ner; to-day's parcels, perhaps, to be
bestowed; and the doors closed, with
feeling of plenty and comfort that only
The thrifty, delicate hOusewife-WhO
knows and utilities the resources that
are but uncomfortable odds and ends
to the disorderly, Needless, procraStin-
ating one-ever has the pleasure of.
All this is, cOzily and in miniature to
the larger care of kitchen and larder,
what the little girls playhouse
has been Off she began, like a
true woman-child, to "spin and
weave " for her womanly voca-
tom to the " house of her own
that -you-began to talk of then,
and that you are earning right to now.
And pretty soon this daily care-this
daily pleasure-will have become ia
Gle thing, thing easily slipped into
the days programme, and never to be
a mountain or bugbear any more,
either to do or to teach; because you
"knOW every twist and turn Of it,
and it is not a process Of conscious de-
tail, but a simple whole that you can
dispose Of with single thought and
its quick mechanical execution.
In like manner, again, you can take
up cooking. You can learn to make
bread, until the fifteen minutes labor
that it will be for you to toss up the
dough for tomorrow baking, will not
seem to you terrible infection, when
it happens that you may have it to do,
any more than the mending of a pair
of gloves for tomorrow wearing; sim
ply because it will BE an old accustomed
thing that you know the beginning and
the end of-not a vague, untried toll
looming in indefinite proportions, that
are always the awful ones.-NrS. a.
D. f. Whitney, IN ST. Nicholas.
A FLORIDA gardener has raised