Household hints

The wise saying that " change is rest " is of value to us. A deep truth underlies that assertion which we will do well to think of. It certainly is one reason why house-work, when moderately indulged in, is heathful and invigorating. It is true in regard to needlework also, and for this reason, when your head is clear, and you feel very much like exerting yourself, it is an excellent thing to cut out a quantity of work of different kinds. The old opinion that one piece of work should be completed before another is begun is not a good or philosophi- cal one. How often after sewing steadily on one garment it has seemed to the excited brain as if each time the needle pierced through the cloth it had penetrated also to the very nerve ! If, then, before you are thus tired, this work has been put away and something else brought forth, which is, to be sure, just as truly work as the other, but so unlike it that it requires different handling, a feeling of relief is experienced, or even of actual refreshment. Somehow, different thoughts are awakened, and in the end more work is accomplished, with less fatigue and loss of energy, than if the woman had persisted in finishing one before beginning another. An advantage to be gained by having more than one piece of work about is, that if you have a habit of hurrying and worrying over everything you undertake, not giving yourself any peace till it is finished, you will learn to take things more easily. Goethe's famous motto, *^ Without haste but without rest," ought to describe the course taken by an earnest woman who feels the necessity of doing for her family all that her strength will allow. It is a fault of the average American woman that she likes too well to be admiringly compared to the swift-winged Mercury, without reflecting that Mercury was fully as swift to do evil as good. And so she often hurries through life, driven far more by inward than outward forces, missing much of the beauty and sweetness that are gained only in quiet and repose. MISTAKEN KINDNESS. It is hard to account for the way in which the daughters of a house are trained for useful lives if we do not at once concede that lack of thought and false reasoning are at the bottom of the trouble. When we see how^ mothers appear to have forgotten their own experience, or seem to expect that their daughters are not to meet the same difficulties they had to contend against, we feel that "knowledge comes but wisdom lingers" in a way that is surprising. It is not an uncommon occurrence — it is one that is taking place every day — for a young woman who has never had any responsibility whatever, whose duties, if she has had any work worthy of the name, have been to sweep and dust a few rooms and to keep fresh flowers in the vases, to marry and leave home and friends to go with her husband to a strange place, where they are to be looked upon and judged as man and woman, without one familiar friend upon whose counsel she may rely. She starts out alone. Possibly at the moment when her mother bids her good-by she realizes what a helpless being she is sending out to do a woman's hard work in the world. It may seem to her excited imagination like a soldier going forth to meet a powerful enemy with only the weapons furnished by ignorance and innocence ; or a pilot who is to steer the boat without the aid of compass, or any knowledge of its use. One hardly knows which to pity most — the poor little bride whose attire symbolizes perfectly the uselessness of her past education, or the deluded young man who has married the girl he loves, and whose bright vision of a home is about to become an actual fact.