When silver is washed clean and laid on the drainer, fill a pitcher with hot water and pour over it.
Now use your judgment and see whether the water is clean enough and hot enough for dishes. If it is, take a pile of plates, or your vegetable dishes, or whatever you think you can cleanse without needing hot water.
Change the water whenever it is necessary.
Never on any account leave dishes lying in
the water while you go to attend to something elsewhere. To do so injures gilding and color. Remember if you are quick you can do a good deal before one water cools, and you will have to change only when it is soiled.
Never put many dishes to wash at one time. The size of your sink or pan will regulate the number. Put dishes of one kind in at one time, and dishes of another kind in the next time. Then you can work rapidly.
If you put in a pile of dinner plates, some bread-and-butter plates, a little pitcher, and a sauce boat, and you find when you are through that the pitcher is cracked, a handle off of the sauce boat, and a chip out of one of the large plates, do not report that you could not prevent these accidents. Such things do not come under the head of accidents; they come under the head of carelessness.
You may rinse plates and dishes in the same way that you do silver, with this difference: you must see that the water poured upon delicate china is not too hot, or it will crack it.
Before you begin to wash at all, ask yourself where you are going to stand your dishes when they are dried. Arrange so that you have room enough without letting clean dishes touch soiled ones, or without being obliged to put dry dishes on a wet spot.
When your silver is dried put it away. Do not let it lie where it will be spattered from the washing of the next things.