2S4 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER. 
APR 43 
don’t see how you do it on the salary you 
mane and do the other things you do, too.” 
Her friend laughed and said, 
“ How many dresses do you think I have?” 
“Oh! I don’t know” replied the other, “I 
never thought; only you always look as if 
you came out of a band-box.” 
“Well,” she answered, “I own just two 
black dresses. One good one, which I wear 
on bright days, and one not quite so good 
which does for the cloudy, dark, or damp 
days.” 
Her friend opened her eyes wide with as¬ 
tonishment. But after thinking a moment 
remembered that she always wore black. 
The secret lay in the way she cared for her 
clothes. Every night before going to bed she 
looked over her dress carefully, put a stitch 
wherever one was needed. Her facing and 
braids were kept in order—and that is a job 
of no small undertaking as my fellow-sisters 
well know. Her dresses fitted well and 
brightened up with something at neck and 
throat, she, as her friend said, “ always looked 
well.” 
Some people buy whatever is fashionable 
without knowing whether it is becoming to 
them or not. This is a great mistake. Now I 
think of all the kuown colors red is the loveli¬ 
est. When I was a youngster I used to implore 
my mother to buy me a red dress, but she 
would not do so, because she told me I’d look 
like a “ fright ” in it. 1 didn’t believe it—be¬ 
cause 1 didn’t know. My sisters wore red; 
why couldn’t I? At any rate I determined 
that as soon as I grew up and could buy my 
own clothes I’d have a complete red suit, from 
the crown of my head to the toe of my foot. 
Did I? Well, I guess not! Imagine anyone 
with light hair, shading on red, wearing 
scarlet! 1 still yearn for a red gown though, 
and I believe if I ever get rich that I’ll have 
one just to walk up and down my own room 
in! 
Neat gloves and good shoes are the most es¬ 
sential points of one’s dress. The French 
have a favorite saying, which, when trans¬ 
lated into our tongue runs—“ If one be well 
gloved and shod, the rest is nothing.” 
Keep your clothes brushed. The dust, if 
allowed to remain, fills in the interstices and 
the garment soon looks rusty. 
DORA HARVEY VROOMAN. 
KITCHEN TALK. 
ANNIE L. .TACK. 
I THINK there is nothing more trying to 
. a housekeeper than the endeavor to get 
up a variety for breakfast in winter in the 
country where the grocer is afar off and the 
butcher calls only once a week. It is true the 
larder of the proverbial farm house is always 
supposed to be full, and the pork barrel is a 
never-failing institution. But if one is the 
least bit inclined to rebel against this as a 
regular stand-by, and does not happen to be 
fond of eggs, the question remains, “What 
shall we have tor nreaktast?” Tiring ot oat¬ 
meal lately we have found wheat middlings a 
pleasant change, light and easy of digestion 
and very quickly and easily prepared. 
Home-made marmalade now that oranges are 
so cheap, is a great treat to some children 
for breakfast. Rice cakes, from leftover 
nailed rice of the day before, can be made up 
with a batter of eggs and milk and naked on 
a griddle, and corn-meal mush fried in gravy, 
is very much relished by children who do not 
care for meat. In spring a breakfast of fresh¬ 
water fish, with asparagus and potatoes and a 
few crisp radishes, is a refreshing change, 
and the fine flour from corn made into batter 
cakes with genuine maple sirup, is a real 
luxury. There is no time of the year when 
one’s appetite is so languid and variable as in 
the first soft days of early spring. 
The proper food for children going to 
school should be a subject of study; for it 
only invites to illness to go out on an empty 
stomach, and yet we all want our little ones 
to eat what we think is suitable for them. 
The habit of taking a little of everything, 
tasting, and leaving part of it, is often copied 
from their elders, and is a pernicious custom. 
Given good, plain food, they should be en¬ 
couraged to fiuish what they accept. “ If 
grandpa was here he’d make you clean up 
your plates,” said a small child once to a 
company who were leaving a lot of tasted 
food to be carried away. 
As I write, the kitchen fire burns low, the 
kettle stops singing, there Is a lull in the do¬ 
mestic machinery. Breakfast is over, the 
clearing up is finished, it is bright and sunny' 
in the window where the canary chirps. 
Some one said that my kitchen was the cheer¬ 
iest room in the house, and that is what I 
want it to be; for with families of moderate 
means in the country much time must be 
.p c iit there, especially as in our case where thp 
daughters are mother’s help. 
OF HIS OPINION STILL. 
U i MOTHER,” writing to the Rural of 
l\ February 16th, fails to see the point 
of my criticism of Charity Sweetheart’s Reve¬ 
ries, and calls it “a tirade against refinement.” 
The dear soul is entitled to her opinion, be It 
right or wrong, but it recalls an anecdote that 
I read somewhere of a debate between two 
children, one of whom delivered this conclu¬ 
sive argument: “It’s so ! for mother says so, 
and if mother says so it’s so if it ain’t so !” 
The “refinement” at which I “sneer” is not 
refinement in any sense of the word, neither 
according to Webster’s Unabridged, nor in 
accordance with the code of the several States 
in which I have been. The pseudo-refinement 
against-which the “tirade” was made is the 
Pharisaical egotism of narrow-minded beings, 
who with the danger of a little learning fond¬ 
ly imagine themselves of a superior mold, and 
who, in soulful yearning after the utterly 
utter, would fain flee to Heliconian hights, 
and serenely exclaim to an admiring world: 
“We thanii God that we are not as are our 
fathers and brothers, who have no more 
brains than so many calves.” If it is refine¬ 
ment to blazon the faults and misfortunes of 
brothers, and others to the gaze of the public; 
to hold up the follies and foibles of loved ones 
to the shafts of ridicule; to be continually en¬ 
gaged in lauding self at the expense of 
others; to be continually saying “I”—‘ I”— 
“I” it must be confessed that I do despise it. 
From masculine women and effeminate 
men 1 pray to be delivered. Whenever I see 
a specimen of the genus Pithecus, commonly 
called dude, I feel a strong desire to turn him 
over a barrel and spank him. “ rthv and deli¬ 
cate ” boys seldom make men of any kind. A 
very few years finish their brief course, and 
they are but a memory. There is a vast differ¬ 
ence between boyish mischief and natural de¬ 
pravity. A healthy boy is naturally mis¬ 
chievous, and when two or more are together 
there will the spirit of mischief be also. The 
ordinary treatment of many boys has a ten¬ 
dency towards driving them away from home 
to the village store, to the saloon, and into 
bad company generally, and I make the asser¬ 
tion that more boys are driven to ruin by the 
treatment accorded them at home than by 
any natural depravity. Anything is good 
enoug for tne DOys, any p ace in the nouse is 
good enough for their room. They don’t need 
anything except plenty to eat, and plenty of 
work to subdue their superabundant ener¬ 
gies. No good clothes are needed, no pocket- 
money, no books, papers, etc., no amusements, 
no holidays. 
Tired mothers exclaim “ Boys are so much 
trouble,” failing to understand the little ani¬ 
mals. Sisters vote them nuisances, and are 
so glad when they have taken themselves 
off, no matter where, just so they are 
gone. Under such circumstances no wonder 
many boys become boorish men, and w'hat 
else should be expected when the training of 
home is made to give place to the influences 
of the saloon, and the village streets ? No 
mother has a right to expect boys to become 
polished men, when she fails to train them 
aright at home. 
Absurd as it may seem to many, I make the 
assertion that a woman may be refiued, and 
yet be unable to write her own name, and on 
the other hand she may have received a com¬ 
mon education and be an ignoramus and a slat¬ 
tern all her life. It is an impossibility to make 
a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. I will instance 
two cases: 
In my early manhood among my acquain¬ 
tances was a young lady whom I considered 
to be finely educated and accomplished. She 
made her home w ith relatives who were both 
educated and refined. The young lady was a 
good conversationalist, as most Southern 
women are, an artist in dress, andaconnoiseur 
in the nic°ties of good breeding, but she could 
not write her name. Ia early life she had 
been unfortunately situated; had never been 
to school and was densely ignorant when her 
aunt took possession of her, ana gave her a 
few years’training. And those few years 
worked wonders. 
Another lady who received the course 
of the district schools, is greatly afflicted by 
the home-adornment mania. The walls of 
her sitting-room are covered.with specimens of 
her handiwork. Crotched what-’al’ye-call- 
’ems, splint thingumbobs, common chromos 
with frames of straw fastened with red 
strings; cbromos with frames of split 
corn-stalks tied with strips of red 
flannel, with paste-board frames, with 
paper frames; chromos tacked on the 
walls, with bits of red flannel over the 
tacks; stnp3 of red and blue tissue paper 
woven into a mat and tacked to the w'all; 
splint card-racks filled with highly colored 
cards; all kinds of figures cut from tissue 
piper and stu*k on the walls; wash-stand 
in one corner filled with u heterogeneous lot of 
glass ware; piles of rubbish mid dirt all over 
the kitchen, floors dirty, windows grimy; 
madame’s dress untidy, with glimpses of under¬ 
clothes, at neck and wrists, positively black; 
baby filthy, with head frescoed with a thick 
coat of grease and dirt that had not been 
washed off since it was born, more than 12 
months before. There w r as home adornment 
with a vengeance! Not any of that kind for 
me, thank you. True? Every word of it, 
and that’s not all. 
“ Concerning the fish story,” There was 
wife in sitting-room, wife’s daughter in par¬ 
lor, negro cook asleep in kitchen, and head of 
the house out in the rain doing the work a 
negro woman was employed to do, all on ac¬ 
count of madame’s nagging temper. 
A MAN. 
NOT DEGRADING WORK. 
D ish-washing— that bugbear of so 
many young girls in families of mod¬ 
erate means—can be robbed of half its terrors 
by getting ready for it. First, a big bib 
apron to cover the whole front of the dress, 
and loose sleeves with rubber bands at top 
and bottom to slip over dainty cuffs, and 
plenty of hot water and towels are necessi¬ 
ties. Then gather up, and sort the dishes for 
washing like this: go around the table taking 
up knives and spoons in one band, and forks 
in the other, to prevent needless scratching: 
next cups and saucers and fruit dishes; then 
vegetable dishes, bone plates; etc., and lastly 
plates and platters, having a convenient dish 
in which to put refuse food for cat, and dog, 
or chickens. Don’t burn any food unless ab¬ 
solutely necessary. A limber knife and bit 
of bread, to scrape and rub off crumbs and 
grease, will make dish-washing a less repul¬ 
sive task. Now, if both hot water and soap 
are used freely enough to give the desired 
cleanliness and polish to the dishes, the fin¬ 
gers will suffer, unless a disn mop, or patent 
dish-washer is used, (if it only was a real 
dish washer) which is only a pair of small 
wire tongs to hold the dish-cloth; a spring 
wire clothes-pin does very good service if 
better cannot be procured. Every woman 
ought to take good care of her hands—keep 
them as soft and pliable as possible without 
doing injustice to her work. Nobody really 
likes to see, or to have, roughened, blackened 
hands, in spite of the poems written on “Lit¬ 
tle Brown Hands,” and with a little care and 
forethought much rough work can be done 
without serious damage to the hands. Stif¬ 
fened fingers can neither mend stockings as 
deftly, nor play the piano as well as supple 
ones, and the busy housewife, who does much 
of her own sewing, will find it economy to 
take good care of her hands, as well as the 
young girl who takes painting or music 
lessons. Wear old gloves when sweeping or 
doing rough work, if graudfather does look 
contemptuous; keep a Dottle of diluted tar¬ 
taric acid handy to remove fruit stains, and 
use glycerine ana rose-water—equal parts— 
to rub ou the hands at night. Thos. K. 
Beecher wrote once that he “should think a 
woman would be glad, when she broke a dish, 
to think that she needn’t wash that same old 
dish 365 times next year—aye, 3 tivies 365 
times,” but so long as we keep this “habit of 
eating,” must dishes be washed, unless that 
millennium dawns, that Mrs. Fisher wished 
for so long ago, “ when dishes will be made 
of such cheap material that after a meal one 
can afford to gather up the four corners of 
the table-cloth and dump the whole thing iu- 
to the back yard, I'd not like to live near 
that back-yard long, however. Dish-washing 
is monotonous and discouraging work, in 
that it never stays done, any more than does 
cooking, or washing and ironing, etc., but if 
“ cleanliness is next to godliness ” it cannot 
be “degrading work,” as I recently heard a 
bright-faced young girl call it. And dish¬ 
washing can be idealized, if one wills, as 
well as digging potatoes I should think, and 
that has been proven by the Rural to be an 
ideal occupation. aunt bktty. 
LOOKING GLAD. 
A S I gazed ou the little dead face of one 
of my own loved household, much bit¬ 
terness was added to my sorrow by the thought 
that he might have been saved if we had only 
summoned the doctor sooner; if we had only 
realized how very sick he was, before it was 
too late to save the precious life. Still another 
source of sorrow is the thought that I did not al¬ 
ways do all that could have been done to make 
that little life happy. It takes so little to make 
a child happy! There is one thing I wish I 
could impress on every young mother’s heart. 
There is something that will cause a child 
more peaceful pleasure, more perfect content 
than all other things. I will give a little 
incident, as an illustration. A mother, 
after a hard day’s work, >vas washing the sup 
per dishes. Six year-old (Igp^bppf wip¬ 
ing them. There was quite a long silence, 
which the little girl broke by asking, “Mam¬ 
ma, what are you looking so glad about?” 
Oh, mothers, acquire the habit of “ looking 
glad.” The little ones in the house with you 
study your faces earnestly. They know noth¬ 
ing of your tired feelings. They do not un¬ 
derstand your troubles. What do they real¬ 
ize of the debts you must help pay, the losses 
you have, the lack of convenient articles to 
do the hard work you must do, and all the 
crosses you must bear! They know only their 
own little wants, and think “mamma” can 
supply them all. If her face is gloomy and 
dark, they are uncomfortable, and try to 
carry alone a burden which a few words 
might set right. 
Oh, mothers, if your little ones must wear 
patches, must eat bread and milk from the 
kitchen table, and do without pretty toys, by 
all means treat them to a pleasant face. 
Bury your own trouble. Keep it out of your 
face. Practice, and practice, till you can 
show a face without the least cross look, 
wEile the little folks can see you. When 
your tears get the better of your resolutions, 
hide till the storm Is over, clear away its 
traces, and smile into the eyes of the first 
prattler you meet. In the old days, you never 
met your lover with cross looks and tears. 
Now, never meet your children, as you would 
have hesitated to let him see you. 
MRS. LEVI H. NILES. 
TWO NEW ENGLAND RECIPES. 
BAKED BEANS. 
Put the beans in cold water to souk, the 
night before. Next morning, put in a colan¬ 
der. and rinse two or three times. Then put 
them in a kettle with the pork you intend to 
bake, cover with water, and boil one and one- 
half hour. It needs one pound of pork for 
one quart of beans. When the beans are soft, 
put into the bean pot with just water enough 
to cover, add a pinch of pepper. Bake three 
or four hours in a moderately hot oven. 
BOSTON BROWN BREAD. 
Three and three-quarters cups of Indian 
corn meal, two and one-half cups of rye meal 
(not flour), two-thirds of a cup of molasses, 
one quart of milk, (either sweet or sour,) two 
eveu tea spoonfuls of soda dissolved in the 
milk: steam in a tin pudding boiler five hour?. 
Take off the cover and leave in until morn¬ 
ing. MRS. J. STEIOLEDEB. 
Womans Work. 
CONDUCTED BV EMILY LOUISE TAPLIN. 
KILLING TIME. 
OLIVE E. DANA. 
I SUPPOSE most of us are busy people 
and therefore as heaitby, earnest folk 
ought, have a hearty contempt for that old 
phrase “ killing time,” and especially for the 
thing itself. It seems to me to belong only to 
certain aimless pleasures of the so-called 
fashionable world, or to the extravagances of 
certain harmless individuals whose intellects 
seem in inverse ratio to their pocket-books. 
It probably does not occur to us that we are 
guilty of the same folly; yet is it not often 
true? Do we not do it practically in many 
ways? Was it not something like it when we 
bestowed much labor, beside dimes and 
dollars, on a ceriaiu piece of fancy-work 
which, when done, had little beauty, it may 
be, or, very likely, was too good for the rest 
of the furnishings? How many hours every 
week do we spend in unprofitable reading? 
How many in equally unprofitable dreaming 
or “moping” or worrying? If we are “alive 
unto God,” our time must partake of that 
consecrated vitality. We are making it in a 
great measure null when we plan out more 
than we can do in a given time and perhaps 
have to leave that which was most necessary. 
We are despoiling it as surely when we over¬ 
load and distend it as when we make it bear 
and hold too little. We do most fatally mis¬ 
use it by over-work and ovtr-worry. There 
is no way so painful to ourselves, who must 
bear the pains of all dying hours, as to thus 
When Baby was sick, we gave her Casuxrt* 
When she wao a Child, she cried for Castoria 
When she became Miss, she clung to Castorla. 
When she had Children. (&a cave t-JlSWCactarU 
