tive laborer. Cultivated,
intelligent women, who are brought up to do the work of their own
families, are labor-saving institutions. They make the head save
the wear of the muscles. By forethought, contrivance, system, and
arrangement, they lessen the amount to be done, and do it with less
expense of time and strength than others. The old New England motto,
_Get your work done up in the forenoon_, applied to an amount of
work which would keep a common Irish servant toiling from daylight to
sunset.

A lady living in one of our obscure New England towns, where there
were no servants to be hired, at last by sending to a distant city
succeeded in procuring a raw Irish maid of all work, a creature of
immense bone and muscle, but of heavy, unawakened brain. In one
fortnight she established such a reign of Chaos and old Night in the
kitchen and through the house that her mistress, a delicate woman,
incumbered with the care of young children, began seriously to think
that she made more work each day than she performed, and dismissed
her. What was now to be done? Fortunately, the daughter of a
neighboring farmer was going to be married in six months, and wanted a
little ready money for her trousseau. The lady was informed that Miss
So-and-so would come to her, not as a servant, but as hired "help."
She was fain to accept any help with gladness. Forthwith came into the
family circle a tall, well-dressed young person, grave, unobtrusive,
self-respecting, yet not in the least presuming, who sat at the family
table and observed all its decorums with the modest self-possession of
a lady. The newcomer took a survey of the labors of a family of ten
members, including four or five young children, and, looking, seemed
at once to throw them into system, matured her plans, arranged her
hours of washing, ironing, baking, cleaning, rose early, moved
deftly, and in a single day the slatternly and littered kitchen
assumed that neat, orderly appearance that so often strikes one in New
England farmhouses. The work seemed to be all gone. Everything was
nicely washed, brightened, put in place, and stayed in place: the
floors, when cleaned, remained clean; the work was always done, and
not doing; and every afternoon the young lady sat neatly dressed in
her own apartment, either writing letters to her betrothed, or sewing
on her bridal outfit. Such is the result of employing those who have
been brought up to do their own work. That tall, fine-looki