culpable
neglect.

By this time we begin to think that madam would have been just as well
off if she had not kept so many servants, and to wonder what they could
have had to do. Perhaps it was the idle man's playmate that made the
trouble. But a little farther reading in the old diary dissipates this
illusion. If anybody thinks that our grandmothers must have been cursed
with ennui because they did not attend three parties a night three times
a week, with operas and theatres to fill in the off nights, they are
mightily mistaken.

Of sociability there could have been no lack in this rural neighborhood,
for besides a ball or two madam records numbers of tea-drinkings and
debating clubs, and meetings of the Clio, a literary club, at which
assisted at least two future judges of the supreme courts of the States
of their adoption, and several other men and women whose names would
attract attention even in our clattering days. Visiting, too, of the
old-fashioned spend-the-day sort had not gone out of date--was indeed so
common that madam one evening enters in her journal--whether in sorrow
or in thankfulness there is nothing to tell us, but at least as a
notable fact--that she had "had no company to-day."

But it was not company that occupied all the hours of so busy a dame as
our diarist. Though she had not to remodel her dresses in hot chase
after the last novelty of the fashion-weekly, she had to superintend the
manufacture of the stuff of which her maids' gowns and her own
morning-gowns were made, to say nothing of bed-and table-linen, etc.
Bridget in our day seems to think that to do a family washing is a labor
of Hercules. Yet seventy years ago before a towel could be washed the
soap wherewith to cleanse it must be made at home; and this not by the
aid of condensed lye or potash, but with lye drawn by a tedious process
of filtering water through barrels or leach-tubs of hard-wood ashes. The
"setting" of these tubs was one of the first labors of the spring, and
to see that Silvy or Jim poured on the water at regular intervals, and
did not continue pouring after the lye had become "too weak to bear up
an egg," was a part of Betsey's daily duty for some weeks. Then came the
soap-boiling in great iron kettles over the fire in the wide fireplace.
Apparently, this was not always a certain operation. Science had not yet
put her meddling but useful finger into the soap-pot, for madam sadly
records that on the twenty-first of