A Little Housekeeping Book for a Little Girl; Or, Margaret's Saturday Mornings

by Caroline French Benton

Her grandmother smiled. "Even a very nice, clean person may bring home a bug from a crowded street-car," she said. "And if it happens to be on a coat which is thrown on a bed, it may crawl quickly into a corner without anybody's seeing it, and presently the bed will have half a dozen bugs in it. Of course a good housekeeper would never let them stay in a bed a single minute after she finds out they are there, and she always hunts occasionally, at least as often as every few months, so that she may be perfectly sure everything is all right. If ever you think you are perfectly safe, my dear, and do not look to make sure, you will be the very one to be surprised some day! You must often put the mattress on a sheet on the floor, and look all along the edge and in the corners and under the ties. The spring must be painted with turpentine, especially in the hidden places, and so must the corners of the bed. It is a good plan to use only metal beds with iron spring frames, for bugs like wood much better; they seldom stay where there is none. If you ever find a bug, or the tiny black speck it makes, get the white of an egg and beat it with a teaspoonful of quicksilver, and paint everything with it, and you will have no more trouble.

"After the bed is cleaned and taken down, the floor is to be swept twice over, and the carpet taken away; the paper under it may be swept clean in the yard. The walls are to be swept down with a soft brush, or a broom covered with a duster. The closet is to be emptied entirely, the drawers, shelves, floor, and baseboard washed well, and the closet floor washed also. The windows must be cleaned and all the woodwork washed in warm water with a little nice soap, and rinsed well. When all is fresh and the floor dry, the paper can be laid, the carpet put down, the furniture wiped again, the bed put together and made, the pictures hung, and the fresh curtains put up, if they are used in summer, and the room will be thoroughly done. All rooms are alike in the way they are cleaned. First do the closets, remember, all the drawers as well as shelves; then, shutting this up, empty the room, and do walls, floor, paint, and windows. If there is a matting down, this must be wiped off with salted water, which freshens it. Now I think we can go down to the cellar for the next part of the lesson."

The cellar proved to be rather chilly, but they stayed long enough to learn a good many things about it. There were two rooms, one for the coal and wood, and one for vegetables and preserved fruit and such things. All these, Margaret was told, must be looked after. The fuel room should have several bins, one for kitchen coal, one for furnace coal, and one low one for wood; it was untidy to leave any of these lying in heaps on the floor. The vegetables had to be constantly looked over for fear any should decay, and so bring sickness to the family, who might never know why it came. The preserves must be examined, lest any begin to leak, and the whole place must be kept cool and dry by having a window open a little at the top, with a good bolt or a few nails to keep any one from opening it from the outside. The windows did not need to be washed quite as often as those up-stairs, but they should never be left grimy and dirty. "A good housekeeper always keeps watch of her cellar," said the grandmother. "She sees that the air is fresh, the floor clean, the walls free from cobwebs, and that no rubbish is allowed to accumulate. The wood and coal must not get too low in the bins; the grocer's boxes must be kept chopped into kindling, and, most important of all, every cellar should have a good coat of whitewash every spring to make it all sweet and clean."

Margaret said she thought she knew this part of her lesson now, and that cellars were not so very interesting.

"Well, suppose we take the attic next," grandmother said, smiling; "that is, if you are really certain you can keep your own cellar clean and nice when you have one." Margaret promised to try.

The attic was a nice, dusky room, with some old furniture, trunks, and boxes, rolls of carpet, and bags of pieces. It had a dry, comfortable sort of smell in the air. "I like attics," said Margaret. "I mean to have a great big one some day, all full of interesting things, like the girls in story-books."

"The more things in your attic the more trouble you will have to be a good housekeeper," said her grandmother. "Let us sit down on this sofa for our lesson, and suppose that was really your own attic. What would you do to put it in order and keep it so!"

"Well," said Margaret, thoughtfully, "I'd move everything out and sweep it; then I'd brush off the walls and wash the windows; then I'd arrange things—and then it would be done."

"Oh, no!" her grandmother replied. "That isn't half. I see you needed the lesson on the attic, as I thought. Now listen:

"You see it is rather dark up here, and so moths love the place, and if it was left to them they would eat up all that is in the trunks. The first thing in cleaning an attic is to empty all the trunks, one at a time, and look everything over. There are pieces of clothing which may be used again which have to go outdoors on the line in the sunshine and be beaten, and furs, especially, require this done frequently. Your pretty little baby things are in one trunk, and those your mother wishes to keep always, so she airs them and refolds the dresses so they will not get discolored streaks by lying always one way; the flannels are aired, too, and folded in papers with perhaps a bit of camphor or a moth ball, though these are not as much protection as the constant airing and shaking is.