Women’s work is,—
I. To please people. II. To feed them in dainty ways. III. To clothe them. IV. To keep them orderly. V. To teach them.
I. To please.—A woman must be a pleasant creature. Be sure that people like the room better with you in it than out of it; and take all pains to get the power of sympathy, and the habit of it.
II. Can you cook plain meats and dishes economically and savourily? If not, make it your first business to learn, as you find opportunity. When you can, advise, and personally help, any poor woman within your reach who will be glad of help in that matter; always avoiding impertinence or discourtesy of interference. Acquaint yourself with the poor, not as their patroness, but their friend: if then you can modestly recommend a little more water in the pot, or half an hour’s more boiling, or a dainty bone they did not know of, you will have been useful indeed.
III. To clothe.—Set aside a quite fixed portion of your time for making strong and pretty articles of dress of the best procurable materials. You may use a sewing machine; but what work is to be done (in order that it may be entirely sound) with finger and thimble, is to be your especial business.
First-rate material, however costly, sound work, and such prettiness as ingenious choice of colour and adaptation of simple form will admit, are to be your aims. Head-dress may be fantastic, if it be stout, clean, and consistently worn, as a Norman paysanne’s cap. And you will be more useful in getting up, ironing, etc., a pretty cap for a poor girl who has not taste or time to do it for herself, than in making flannel petticoats or knitting stockings. But do both, and give—(don’t be afraid of giving;—Dorcas wasn’t raised from the dead that modern clergymen might call her a fool)—the things you make to those who verily need them. What sort of persons these are, you have to find out. It is a most important part of your work.
IV. To keep them orderly,—primarily clean, tidy, regular in habits.—Begin by keeping things in order; soon you will be able to keep people, also.
Early rising—on all grounds, is for yourself indispensable. You must be at work by latest at six in summer and seven in winter. (Of course that puts an end to evening parties, and so it is a blessed condition in two directions at once.) Every day do a little bit of housemaid’s work in your own house, thoroughly, so as to be a pattern of perfection in that kind. Your actual housemaid will then follow your lead, if there’s an atom of woman’s spirit in her—(if not, ask your mother to get another). Take a step or two of stair, and a corner of the dining-room, and keep them polished like bits of a Dutch picture.
If you have a garden, spend all spare minutes in it in actual gardening. If not, get leave to take care of part of some friend’s, a poor person’s, but always out of doors. Have nothing to do with greenhouses, still less with hothouses.
When there are no flowers to be looked after, there are dead leaves to be gathered, snow to be swept, or matting to be nailed, and the like.
V. Teach—yourself first—to read with attention, and to remember with affection, what deserves both, and nothing else. Never read borrowed books. To be without books of your own is the abyss of penury. Don’t endure it. And when you’ve to buy them, you’ll think whether they’re worth reading; which you had better, on all accounts.
| I. | To please people. |
| II. | To feed them in dainty ways. |
| III. | To clothe them. |
| IV. | To keep them orderly. |
| V. | To teach them. |
(Glacier catastrophe, page 22.)
With the peculiar scientific sagacity on which Professor Tyndall piques himself, he has entirely omitted to inquire what would be the result on a really brittle body,—say a sheet of glass, four miles long by two hundred feet thick, (A to B, in this figure, greatly exaggerates the proportion in depth,) of being pushed down over a bed of rocks of any given probable outline—say C to D. Does he suppose it would adhere to them like a tapering leech, in the line given between C and D? The third sketch shows the actual condition of a portion of a glacier flowing from E to F over such a group of rocks as the lower bed of the Glacier des Bois once presented. Professor Tyndall has not even thought of explaining what course the lines of lower motion, or subsidence, (in ice of the various depths roughly suggested by the dots) would follow on any hypothesis; for, admitting even Professor Ramsay’s theory, that the glacier cut its own bed—(though it would be just as rational to think that its own dish was made for itself by a custard pudding)—still the rocks must have had some irregularity in shape to begin with, and are not cut, even now, as smooth as a silver spoon.
[1] See first terminal note. [↑]
[2] Or Méhun, near Beaugency, Loire. [↑]
[3] On Mr. M’Fie’s motion for a committee to consider the relations that subsist between the United Kingdom and the Colonies. On the varieties of filial sentiment, compare Herodotus, iii. 38; iv. 26. [↑]