s 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. She does not escape being
obliged to do housework at intervals, but she does it in a weak,
blundering, confused way, that makes it twice as hard and disagreeable
as it need be.

Now what I have to say is, that, if every young woman learned to do
housework and cultivated her practical faculties in early life, she
would, in the first place, be much more likely to keep her servants,
and, in the second place, if she lost them temporarily, would avoid
all that wear and tear of the nervous system which comes from constant
ill-success in those departments on which family health and temper
mainly depend. This is one of the peculiarities of our American life
which require a peculiar training. Why not face it sensibly?

The second thing I have to say is, that our land is now full of
motorpathic institutions to which women are sent at great expense to
have hired operators stretch and exercise their inactive muscles. They
lie for hours to have their feet twigged, their arms flexed, and all
the different muscles of the body worked for them, because they are so
flaccid and torpid that the powers of life do not go on. Would it not
be quite as cheerful and less expensive a process if young girls from
early life developed the muscles in sweeping, dusting, ironing,
rubbing furniture, and all the multiplied domestic processes which our
grandmothers knew of? A woman who did all these, and diversified the
intervals with spinning on the great and little wheel, never came to
need the gymnastics of Dio Lewis or of the Swedish motorpathist, which
really are a necessity now. Does it not seem poor economy to pay
servants for letting our muscles grow feeble, and then to pay
operators to exercise them for us? I will venture to say that our
grandmothers in a week went over every movement that any gymnast has
invented, and went over them to some productive purpose, too.

Lastly, my paper will not have been in vain if those ladies who have
learned and practice the invaluable accomplishment o