Sunday is often the hardest day of all; the children require especial care. There is church in the morning, Sunday school in the afternoon, and, in many cases, church at night. In the mean while the children are on hand all the time. Where is the man who will say that his business life is as exacting or as harassing as the work which is here outlined?
In the pages which follow it is the intention to bear the housekeeper and her requirements in mind, and to suggest what is properly due her in the way of labor-saving devices, with a view to facilitate the manifold operations of housekeeping.
CHAPTER III.
MODERN CONVENIENCES.—A LITTLE HISTORY.—PLANS THAT MAKE EXTRA WORK.—MODERN CONVENIENCES ENUMERATED.
Most of the conveniences of housekeeping are modern. It is only within the past few years that the demands of the housekeeper for helps or aids in making her work easier were thought worth considering. Even now we occasionally meet men who think that anything that was good enough for their mothers is good enough for their wives. We have in mind a farmer who, during fifteen years, purchased three large farms. He buried a wife for every farm. Their death was the result of more than slavish work. The disposition which leads in this direction often continues after the time when economy does not demand close living.
The man who moves west to a new country cannot pay for many of the modern conveniences. The demand for them is not great. Such a man usually builds a house of two or three rooms. The family cook and eat in the kitchen; they sit there between meals. The other rooms are for beds. There is not a great deal of house-work to be done in a house of this kind. The trouble comes when the pioneer becomes wealthier, and builds a large house "in town" or on the farm. Possibly his wife or daughters do the work as they did in the smaller house. If not, it is done by one servant. The work in this house is a great deal harder. There is a great deal more of it than there was in the two or three room house, which was built during their earlier life. In the former house, if they had coffee, it was poured from the pot in which it was made directly into the cups which were on the table. The meat was taken from the skillet in which it was cooked and put into the plates of those who ate it. If they had pancakes, the wife would sit with her back near the stove, where she could easily reach the griddle to grease it and turn the cakes while she was eating her meal. There was no formal dessert. The pie was eaten from the same plates as the rest of the food. There were no napkins; often, no tablecloth.
It did not take long to wash the dishes after a meal of this kind—there were not many of them. In from fifteen to twenty-five minutes after the meal was over, the wife could be seen sitting by the kitchen stove, sewing or knitting. The pans and the kettles were out of the way, and the kitchen was turned into a sitting-room. If the weather was cold, the door into the bedroom was open; the whole house was warm and comfortable. Wood was plenty and cheap.
This woman’s troubles began when her husband, by dint of hard work and close economy, found himself in a position to gratify his pride in his accumulated wealth by building a new house. It was a big white house with green blinds. The stories were twelve or thirteen feet high; a large hall ran through the centre; the kitchen had nothing in it but doors and windows and a stove-hole; there was no sink, no conveniences of any kind. They now had a separate dining and sitting room, and an awful parlor with brussels carpet on it, which had red and green flowers all over it. The bedrooms were upstairs. They were all large; wood-work painted white. In the winter they were cold. The old habits of economy which made this house possible had so fixed themselves upon the occupants that they would not build a fire in the bedrooms. They said that they “didn’t think it healthy to sleep in a warm room.”