St. Johnsbury Caledonian. [volume] (St. Johnsbury, Vt.) 1867-1919, 1880-09-17
Secret of Yankee Thrift.

IA Southerner's Gleanings in Connecticut
Looking closely at the face of one of
those women whose habit it is to do
the washing of the family, I saw what
| had not before observed, that in her
youth she must have been quite pretty.
Her education had not been neglected,
her tastes were refined her brow showed
intellect. The vivacity, the ease and
grace of manner, the flow of converse
ton on many topics, so natural to wom-
en- of leisure, were wanting. They had
gone, methought, into the wash-tub and
the cooking-stove. And yet, tired as
she was on washing and ironing days,
she was not unhappy. Her father, a
man in good circumstances, not grasp
ing, but noted rather for his liberality,
had preferred for her the school of the
milliner to the fashionable boarding
school, and as a milliner she had work
ed for many years. Her husband, who
is evidently prospecting and certainly is
kind, thinks it no hardship for her to do
the work to which l have alluded.
Neither he nor his wife appear to re-
gard it as drudgery.
Here, then, is the grand social divis-
ion between North and South. Here
comes in the saving which makes one
section rich and keeps the other in
debt. ''But the woman holds up the
heavy end of the log, and that is not
right" In this particular case the hus-
band finds better paying work than
milking, chopping wood, gardening,
etc.; but thousands of husbands do
these things as matter of course. /
have seen a professional man, well
enough off to be thought rich in our
part of the world, Hacking his shoes in
his front porch, where every passer-by
could see him. The minister in, a
man of attachments, often passed
through the principal street of the viii
lage, pail in hand, on his return from
milking. Illustrations drawn from his
personal experience as farmer, gave a
point to his sermons that nothing else
could have given. The richest citizen
-, a man of So, blows big horn in
the village band. Not only hotel men,
my trunk up and downstairs. Only
large city hotels indulge in the luxury
of a porter. My landlord in Litchfield
said he had been thinking for a long
time about getting little darby to set
up Ill DtSlueSS DIS IL DOOU-DltlCh. w
three hotels,n said he, fought to give
him good living" In brief, the men
as well as the women in New England
know how to use their hands, and are
not afraid to soil them. 1t is the Gus
tom of the country, and one of long
standing. ga Lebanon town account
of services and supplies upon this occa-
sion (the breaking out of the Revolution)
made out subsequently, as in all the
towns in Connecticut, for settlement at
the colonial reasury-awards Trum-
bull, for his own personal labor at this
time, the sum of two pounds and six
teen shillings." .Trumbull was then
governor of the state, but had store
few hundred yards from where l am
now writing, and there he did the box
ing, barreling, ETC., for which the above
bill was rendered. Such things on the
part of men and women do not tally
with our southern customs or fit into
our modes of thought. But what will
you ? You can't eat your cake and
have it too. In its last form the ques-
ton shapes itself thus: ''Isn't it better
to have fewer ladies and gentlemen,
and more independence ?" You and 1
might say "no," bat taking the world
as we find it, there would be much to
rejoice at if all its rural districts were
peOpled as New England is,