It is a shiftless trick to snuff a candle with your fingers, or your wife’s best scissors, to throw the snuff on the carpet, or on the polished floor, and then to extinguish it by treading on it!
To borrow a choice book; to read it with unwashed hands, that have been used in the charcoal bin, and finally to return it daubed on every leaf with nose-blood spots, tobacco spatter, and dirty finger-marks—this is a vile trick!
It is not altogether cleanly to use one’s knife to scrape boots, to cut harness, to skin cats, to cut tobacco, and then to cut apples which other people are to eat.
It is an unthrifty trick to bring in eggs from the barn in one’s coat pocket, and then to sit down on them.
It is a filthy trick to borrow of or lend for others’ use, a tooth-brush, or a tooth-pick; to pick one’s teeth at table with a fork, or a jack-knife; to put your hat upon the dinner table among the dishes; to spit generously into the fire, or at it, while the hearth is covered with food set to warm; for sometimes a man hits what he don’t aim at.
It is an unmannerly trick to neglect the scraper outside the door, but to be scrupulous in cleaning your feet after you get inside, on the carpet, rug, or andirons; to bring your drenched umbrella into the entry, where a black puddle may leave to the housewife melancholy evidence that you have been there.
It is soul-trying for a neat dairywoman to see her “man” watering the horse out of her milk-bucket; or filtering horse-medicine through her milk-strainer; or feeding his hogs with her water-pail; or, after barn-work, to set the well-bucket outside the curb and wash his hands out of it.
ELECTRO-CULTURE.
A few years ago, all the world was agog about electricity applied to vegetation. Sanguine persons grew red in the face with excitement, and enterprising schemers hoped to supersede all past processes of culture by this magical fluid. Things were to be made to grow not only as fast as lightning but by lightning. Those mischievous bolts which had played their dangerous pranks with chimneys, oaks, and towers, were to be regularly harnessed and set to work in the field like horses or oxen. Many of our readers