34 PLAKT AND PLEASANT TALK 



To plant orchards, and allow your cattle to eat the trees 

 up. When gnawed down, to save your money, by trying 

 to nurse the stubs into good trees, instead of getting fresh 

 ones from the nursery. 



To allow an orchard to have blank spaces, where trees 

 have died, and when the living trees begin to bear, to wake 

 up and put young whips in the vacant spots. 



It is very shiftless to build your barnyard so that every 

 rain shall drain it ; to build your privy and dig your well 

 close together ; to build a privy of more than seven feet 

 square — some shiftless folks have it of the size of the whole 

 yard ; to set it in the most exposed spot on the premises ; 

 to set it at the very far end of the garden, for the pleasure 

 of traversing mud-puddles and labyiinths of wet weeds 

 in rainy days. 



It is a dirty trick to make bread without washing one's 

 hands after cleaning fish or chickens ; to use an apron for a 

 handkerchief; to use a veteran handkerchief just from the 

 wars for an apron ; to use milk-pans alternately for wash- 

 bowls and milk. To wash dishes and baby linen in the same 

 tub, either alternately or altogether ; to chew snuff while 

 you are cooking, for sometimes food will chance to be too 

 highly spiced. We have a distinct but unutterable remem- 

 brance of a cud of tobacco in a dish of hashed porh — but 

 it was before we were married ! 



A lady of our acquaintance, at a boarding-house, excited 

 some fears among her friends, by foaming at the mouth, of 

 madness. In eating a hash (made, doubtless, of every scrap 

 from the table, not consumed the day before), she found 

 herself blessed with a mouthful of hard soap^ which only 

 lathered the more, the more she washed at it. It is a filthy 

 thing to comb one's hair in a small kitchen in the intervals 

 of cooking the breakfast ; to use the bread trough for 

 a cradle — a thing which we have undoubtedly seen ; 

 to put trunks, boxes, baskets, with sundry other utensils, 

 under the bed where you keep the cake for company ; we 



