518 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER. 
July 23 
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I Woman and ♦ 
| The Home. ♦ 
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FROM DAY TO DAY. 
Lamp shades of cartridge paper are 
among the newer ideas. The shape used 
is the formal Empire style, a semi-cir¬ 
cular strip of the paper, on the bias, be¬ 
ing folded about a wire frame, and pasted 
neatly together. A narrow strip of 
smooth paper is pasted around the top 
and bottom as a binding. The cartridge 
paper may be purchased in a number of 
colors, old rose, oak yellow and regi¬ 
mental gray being favorites. Any bluish 
tints are, however, a mistake in lamp 
shades, because they give such a ghastly 
tinge to the complexion. The cartridge- 
paper shades are rendered more orna¬ 
mental by cutting out spaces, and in¬ 
serting good pictures in black-and-white, 
especially reproductions of pen-and-ink 
drawings. It is very easy to obtain fine 
portraits of celebrities, or famous land¬ 
scapes, which are attractively used in 
this way. 
* 
A vkry convenient wardrobe, to be 
placed in a recess in a bedroom, consists 
of a wooden frame smoothly covered 
with a firm quality of glazed muslin or 
holland. The front consists of a roller 
blind, fastened at the bottom by hooks 
and rings. At the back, the framework 
permits the screwing in of hooks. A 
.Japanese bead and reed portiere is hung 
in front of the recess. This is much bet¬ 
ter than many of the improvised ward¬ 
robes ; it is light, inexpensive, and ex¬ 
cludes dust perfectly. We think the 
Japanese reed portieres much prefer¬ 
able, in a bedroom, to any stuff hang¬ 
ings ; they are so much cleaner. Modern 
ideas favor the absence of superfluous 
draperies, rugs, etc., in our sleeping 
chambers; and there is a complete 
change in the ornate fashions of a few 
years ago, when muslins and laces dis¬ 
guised the comfort of a room furnished 
in what was then the prevailing mode. 
* 
Why do red-haired girls always im¬ 
agine that they are doomed to wear 
nothing but blue? It is a sad mistake, 
and usually a most unbecoming one. 
Many girls whose hair is familiarly de¬ 
scribed as red, grow up with the idea 
that these tints, varying from yellow- 
red to bronze, are invariably ugly. This 
is especially true in country districts ; in 
the cities, the reddish tints are now 
often produced artificially. The bright 
deep blues often worn by the girl with 
warm-hued locks really intensify the 
color of the hair, while pale blue is 
worse yet. bright browns and chest¬ 
nuts, on the contrary, are most becom¬ 
ing. If the ruddy-haired woman has a 
bright color, deep glowing red-purples— 
what are known as dahlia or petunia 
purple—will be most becoming, but she 
must not wear blue-purple. Primrose 
yellow or pale amber will suit her, for 
Slimmer gowns, and cream-white will 
also be one of the best colors she can 
wear, but she must avoid bluish or dead 
white. The only pink she may venture 
on is a yellowish salmon or apricot, and 
this but sparingly. There are tints of 
red which may be worn, but they need 
such care in selection that it is wiser to 
leave them alone, unless one is very sure 
that they are really becoming. A girl 
who has red hair with brown or hazel 
eyes, may wear many colors unsuited to 
one with blue or gray eyes. Black or 
black and white are usually very becom¬ 
ing to red-haired people. In arranging 
w r arm-liued hair, it usually shows at its 
best when brushed to the highest sheen, 
and allowed to form waves or ripples 
rather than actual curls. ‘‘Frizzes” are 
now hopelessly out of date, fortunately, 
but frizzed red hair was really uglier 
than any other color, because the tint 
was intensified, while the satiny gloss 
was destroyed. Heavy waves and coils 
or braids of red hair, properly brushed, 
always possess a beauty of their own, 
though it is often hard to persuade the 
owner of the Titian locks that such is 
the case. _ 
HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES. 
An old proverb asserts that one-half 
of the world doesn’t know how the other 
half lives. This statement is true of 
housekeepers as of every one else. The 
farm housewife, when preparing for 
dinner, can usually expect, at this sea¬ 
son, a sufficient supply of fresh vege¬ 
tables and fruits. It isn't always con¬ 
venient or agreeable to go out into the 
dewy garden patch, to gather beans or 
peas or small fruits ; it is hard on clothes, 
and it is hard on the temper, too, when 
a dozen things indoors are calling for 
attention at the same time. 
But contrast the dewy garden patch 
with the vegetable market shown in 
Fig. 235. This picture is engraved from 
a photograph taken in one of the poorer 
quarters of New York City. Such mar¬ 
kets, showing stale vegetables and doubt¬ 
ful poultry, are a common feature. The 
picture was taken in early Spring ; such 
stands are still less attractive now, 
while the parched pavements and reek¬ 
ing gutters exhale the composite odors 
of waste and decay. We watched a tiny 
child playing near such a stand recently; 
barefooted, bareheaded, and clad in one 
cotton garment, she sat on the dusty 
sidewalk, and arranged a group of turnip 
and onion tops into a make-believe gar¬ 
den, singing to herself as she did so. We 
wondered what that little mite would 
think if transported into a real gar¬ 
den, with liberty to make clean sand pies 
to her heart’s content ! 
The city Board of Health keeps close 
watch of the materials sold at the poorer 
markets, and tons of fruits and vege¬ 
tables are destroyed, as unfit for human 
consumption, every Summer. In spite 
of the vigilance exercised, a good deal 
of such material gets past the inspectors, 
and is sold among the very poor, espec¬ 
ially in the foreign quarters of the city. 
FUNERAL INSURANCE. 
A gloomily-grotesque institution among 
provident English workmen is a “ burial 
club.” It is a mutual-benefit organiza¬ 
tion, to which each man pays trifling 
dues—it may be a few pence, or it may 
be a shilling each week. When death 
comes to a member’s family, the club 
assumes all funeral expenses. The burial 
club thus becomes insurance against the 
grim specter of a pauper funeral, the 
haunting dread of so many of the decent 
poor. We do not know of any “ burial 
clubs” in this country, but a great many 
of the poor city dwellers prepare for the 
same necessity through the system of in¬ 
dustrial insurance. This differs from 
ordinary life insurance in that the pre¬ 
miums are payable weekly, instead of in 
an annual lump sum. It may be ob¬ 
tained for very small amounts, and for 
children over a year old as well as adults. 
For this reason, people of the poorer 
working class may scrape together money 
enough for these payments, while they 
would find it impossible to pay a yearly 
premium of perhaps $25. 
While seated in the little kitchen of a 
Chicago switchman, this point came 
under discussion. In New York, a man 
of the same means would live in a tene¬ 
ment “ flat.” In Chicago, it is possible 
for him to buy a lot in the unimproved 
part of the South or West Side, where 
he usually puts up a little one-story-and- 
basement cottage, of a type that seems 
to be peculiar to Chicago. Sometimes 
the basement is an unattainable luxury, 
and then the little cellarless house sets 
up on four little brick legs, affording a 
playground for the prairie winds beneath. 
The switchman’s wife was bemoaning 
the shiftlessness of a neighbor, who was 
constantly in trouble. “ There she is, 
wfith two boys working, and never a 
cent ahead or a dollar of insurance, and 
one of those children may go any day.” 
“ But she is a widow ; do you mean she 
ought to insure her own life for the 
children ? ” 
“ ’Course she ought to be insured her¬ 
self, but she ought to insure every one 
of them five children.” was the vigorous 
response. “ I’ve had eight, and every 
one was insured as soon as he was old 
enough to be taken by the insurance 
company.” 
“ Why do you insure your children ? 
It seems dreadful.” 
“It’s worse to lose one of them, and 
have no money to bury him,” responded 
the mother. “When that woman next 
door had scarlet fever in her house, and 
lost two, the county had to bury them. 
Thank the Lord, I never had that dis¬ 
grace, though my second girl died when 
my man was out of a job, and all we had 
was what one of the girls earned in the 
baseball factory, and another of them 
sealing beef cans at the packing house.” 
It was soon found that the insurance 
collector, with his note book, was a very 
familiar feature among the working 
people. Premiums are paid weekly, fort¬ 
nightly, irfonthly or quarterly, as may 
be desired, but most of the poorer people 
pay weekly. In the case of weekly pay¬ 
ments, the premiums may be unpaid for 
four weeks, in case of necessity, without 
lapse of policy, and this provision is of 
great value to persons who may be 
temporarily out of work. The premium 
rate varies, of course, with the age of 
the person insured. A person 30 years 
old is insured for $500 for about 30 cents 
a week. A child is insured for 10 cents 
a week, the amount being from $30 up¬ 
wards ; $25 to $40 is usually the largest 
amount for very young children. This 
insurance must not be confused with 
the “graveyard insurance” of young 
children, which was the subject of legal 
inquiry in some of the States a few years 
ago. It is really a provision for decent 
burial and, among the working people 
who are the strongest patrons of indus¬ 
trial insurance, the money thus obtained 
is rarely reserved for any purpose ex¬ 
cept that of funeral expenses. Among 
people of small means, death and debt 
so often walk together that it is certainly 
an actual duty to endeavor to lift this 
added shadow from the survivors, and 
few people are so indigent that they can¬ 
not make such provision in this way. 
The thrifty city laborer’s wife sets aside 
so much for the rent, and so much for 
insurance, before she begins to spend on 
other necessities. There are many 
country homes in which ordinary insur¬ 
ance seems out of reach, where such a 
provision, made by the industrial sys¬ 
tem, without any deprivation, would 
keep the home together after the loss of 
its main support. 
THE COOKING BOX. 
Last year, Tiie R. N.-Y. described the 
Aladdin oven, in response to numerous 
queries regarding it, and mention was 
also made of the cooking box, as de¬ 
scribed by Mrs. Abel. In a recent num¬ 
ber of the American Kitchen Magazine, 
Edward Atkinson, the inventor of the 
Aladdin oven, gives his experience with 
the cooking box. He says : 
“ First, I took a large, square box, too 
big for the purpose, made of slabs of 
non-heat-conducting magnesia, in which 
to box up my heat. A ham, previously 
soaked all night, was placed in a large 
kettle, filled with water, which was then 
brought to a boil in 20 minutes on the 
range; then the kettle with the hot 
water containing a large volume of 
specific heat, was put into the box, the 
corners packed with old newspapers and 
some old blankets laid over the top. In 
eight hours, the ham was thoroughly 
cooked. It was taken out, the skin re¬ 
moved, dusted with shredded wheat 
powdered, and placed in the oven for 
half an hour to bake. It was one of a 
set of hard southern hams, and was not 
as much softened in the process as I had 
expected it would be. 
“I then had made a tin stand two 
inches thick, filled in with air-cell as¬ 
bestos for a base. Over this is inverted 
a round box made of tin, with the walls 
two inches apart, filled in with air-cell 
asbestos. The diameter inside is 11 
inches ; height in the clear, seven inches. 
With this I had a tin pail made 10 )4 
inches in diameter, (i% inches in the 
clear. 
“ On Sunday morning, I cut from the 
Sunday roast of beef about three pounds 
of the back of the rump, placed this in 
one of the excellent jars now sold for 
use in refrigerators, with fiat cover, re¬ 
cessed knob ; the meat about filled a six- 
inch jar. 1 added some soup stock and 
seasoning, filling the jar nearly to the 
lip. The tin pail was then filled with 
water which was brought to a boil. In 
it I placed the jar raised on an inverted 
saucer so as to get water underneath as 
well as around the sides. The pail was 
placed on the stand, and the non-heat¬ 
conducting case placed over it at 10 
o'clock. The other nine pounds of the 
roast were placed in the Aladdin oven an 
hour or two later. Both were served at 
two o’clock. No difference could be 
detected in the taste of the meat, or in 
the quality of the cooking, with the eyes 
shut. The roast was perfect, and was 
well browned in the oven. The piece 
cooked in the box was uniformly cooked, 
a little rare, but very juicy. 
“ I have since tried some apples cored 
and quartered with syrup, but in this 
case I used too large a jar in proportion 
to the quantity of water. They stayed 
under the case all night. The apple was 
deliciously cooked, retaining all its 
flavor, but the texture was not as much 
broken down as under the ordinary 
method of stewing. For preparing soup 
stock from cold meats and vegetables, 
