What is prettier than a hardwood floor after it has been properly scrubbed? To scrub a floor and get satisfactory results is a science. To change the water frequently is one secret of success. "Elbow grease" is another. Mops are impossible, and this is another subject on which the housekeeper can wax eloquent. What is more disgusting than to see the baseboards of a room smeared, or the dirt shoved in the corners with an old dirty mop?
Before commencing to scrub, place every article of furniture on the table and then sweep. Beginning in the rear of the door so as not to track over the clean part until it is perfectly dry, scrub with a brush a small section at a time; first wipe up with a damp rag and then with a dry one. The New York Knitting Mills, of Albany, N. Y., furnish remnants of cloth that are indispensable for scrubbing. Enough of these remnants can be bought for $3 to last six months.
A little ammonia in the water will help to whiten the floors. The modern skewers from the kitchen are very useful in getting into the corners of the window sills and into the corners of the stair steps. A weak solution of oxalic acid and boiling water will remove the very worst kind of ink-stains from the floor.
Pads for kneeling on are made of burlap, and one is given to each scrubber. The unnatural position that the scrubber assumes makes the work laborious; the scrubber may change her position frequently by getting clean water.
How to Get Rid of Vermin.
The worst kind of house-pests, if you do not know how to get rid of them, but not the easiest to exterminate, are bedbugs. They do not confine themselves to any section of the country, though the International Encyclopedia gives the belief "that up to Shakespeare's time they were not known in England," and that "they came originally from India."
In Kansas, the bedbug is improperly called the chintz-bug, and is believed to dwell under the bark of the cotton-wood tree. There is no authentic truth for this belief.
The spread of the bedbug is mainly due to its being carried from place to place in furniture and clothing. It has the power of resisting great cold and of fasting indefinitely. The eggs of the bedbug are very small, whitish, oval objects, laid in clusters in the crevices used by the bugs for concealment; they hatch in eight days. Under favorable conditions and slovenly housekeeping, their multiplication is extremely rapid. The greatest trouble lies with the housekeeper who allows the bugs to increase unchecked until they are so numerous in the floors and walls that it is nearly impossible to kill them off.