I dread those
household storms, of all things."
Silently pondering these anxieties of the young expectant housekeeper, I
resumed my pen, and concluded my paper as follows.
* * * * *
In this country, our democratic institutions have removed the
superincumbent pressure which in the Old World confines the servants to
a regular orbit. They come here feeling that this is somehow a land of
liberty, and with very dim and confused notions of what liberty is. They
are for the most part the raw, untrained Irish peasantry, and the wonder
is, that, with all the unreasoning heats and prejudices of the Celtic
blood, all the necessary ignorance and rawness, there should be the
measure of comfort and success there is in our domestic arrangements.
But, so long as things are so, there will be constant changes and
interruptions in every domestic establishment, and constantly recurring
interregnums when the mistress must put her own hand to the work,
whether the hand be a trained or an untrained one. As matters now are,
the young housekeeper takes life at the hardest. She has very little
strength,--no experience to teach her how to save her strength. She
knows nothing experimentally of the simplest processes necessary to keep
her family comfortably fed and clothed; and she has a way of looking at
all these things which makes them particularly hard and distasteful to
her.
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