I.
SYSTEM IN WORK.
“I HAVE been hard at work all day,” we think we hear some say; “up stairs and down, from the cellar to the attic, looking into every nook and corner, and ‘putting things to rights’ generally. O dear! I wonder what next those grim old housekeepers would expect me to take hold of. I have everything in good running order, as far as I can see, and now how I would like to take a book and curl up somewhere, out of sight and hearing, and have one of the old-fashioned good times I used to have before I was married. Well, I don’t care. I mean to have it, anyhow, and just let things go on without my watching, for a while. Nora can manage to keep the house in order, somehow, now I have everything in its right place, I am sure.”
Ah! but, my dear little woman, if you do not give daily attention to your household affairs, in a few days, under Nora’s rule, you will find the machinery all out of order, and be compelled again to go over the same wearisome labor you now complain of.
“What then am I to do? From this time on, is my life to be a perpetual drudgery?”
No; not if you are wise. Be patient. It is a new thing to you now. Care does not sit lightly on young shoulders; but time and a reasonable amount of patience will soon make the “crooked ways straight, and the rough places smooth.” A few weeks of extra time and thought, at the beginning of your new life, will teach you how to work methodically. Until this lesson is fixed in your mind, it will be “uphill work”; but persevere. Have a regular plan for each day’s work, and every step will be easier and more natural.
There is nothing like method and regularity to lighten labor. We have so many poor, discouraged, repining housekeepers, chiefly because they were not taught from the beginning to work methodically. Let this once become a fixed habit, and almost every one can find leisure for reading and recreation, certainly if in a position where they can delegate the hardest, roughest labor, under suitable supervision, to a servant.
Secure a few moments every evening to think over and arrange for the necessary labor of the morrow. Bring before your mind just what ought to be done, and fix the mode and time for doing it distinctly. While dressing, the next morning, review your plan, that all through the day it may be like a map spread out before your eyes. Of course, many things may occur that no foresight could provide for,—sickness, unexpected company, or interruptions past your control,—but nothing that can wholly derange a well-digested plan for every day’s duties.
Try this mode of working resolutely for a few months, and labor or oversight of labor will become so nearly a second nature that you will arrange, or perform almost instinctively, even with pleasure, that which now seems a heavy burden, grievous to be borne. To show just what may be done, let us take a glance at the arrangements for washing and ironing days.
Every housekeeper has her own way of apportioning the work of her servants. Where there are three girls, many prefer that the cook should take charge of the washing, leaving either waiter or chambermaid to do the cooking Mondays and Tuesdays. If these are tolerable plain cooks, this may answer; but, generally, on those two days the table is less pleasantly served than during the remainder of the week.
Now, we prefer to feel as sure of a well-cooked and well-served dinner on “washing-day” as on any other day in the week. For that reason, we think it a more excellent way to have the cook understand that the kitchen, pantries, and cooking are her own especial care; from which, until that work is done, she is not to be called to assist in anything else. This plan, we think, insures a more orderly kitchen, cleaner pantries, and better prepared and more regular meals, than when the cooking is given over, two days in the week, to one less accustomed to it. We see no good reason why, if company happens in unexpectedly, one should not be as well prepared to serve them on Monday as on Wednesday or Thursday. By giving the washing into the care of the second girl, we think one may escape most of the terrors of “washing-day.”