ges, and to consideration and respect into the bargain; but if she be
wholly deficient in these particulars, and can merely dawdle about with a
bucket and a broom, she can be of very little consequence; to lose her, is
merely to lose a consumer of food, and she can expect very little indeed
in the way of desire to make her life easy and pleasant. Why should any
one have such desire? She is not a child of the family. She is not a
relation. Any one as well as she can take in a loaf from the baker, or a
barrel of beer from the brewer. She has nothing whereby to bind her
employer to her. To sweep a room any thing is capable of that has got two
hands. In short, she has no useful skill, no useful ability; she is an
ordinary drudge, and she is treated accordingly.

88. But, if such be her state in the house of an employer, what is her
state in the house of a _husband_? The lover is blind; but the husband has
eyes to see with. He soon discovers that there is something wanted
besides dimples and cherry cheeks; and I would have fathers seriously
reflect, and to be well assured, that the way to make their daughters to
be long admired, beloved and respected by their husbands, is to make them
skilful, able and active in the most necessary concerns of a family.
Eating and drinking come three times every day; the preparations for
these, and all the ministry necessary to them, belong to the wife; and I
hold it to be impossible, that at the end of two years, a really ignorant,
sluttish wife should possess any thing worthy of the name of love from her
husband. This, therefore, is a matter of far greater moment to the father
of a family, than, whether the Parson of the parish, or the Methodist
Priest, be the most "_Evangelical_" of the two; for it is here a question
of the daughter's happiness or misery for life. And I have no hesitation
to say, that if I were a labouring man, I should prefer teaching my
daughters to bake, brew, milk, make butter and cheese, to teaching them to
read the Bible till they had got every word of it by heart; and I should
think, too, nay I should know, that I was in the former case doing my duty
towards God as well as towards my children.

89. When we see a family of dirty, ragged little creatures, let us inquire
into the cause; and ninety-nine times out of every hundred we shall find
that the parents themselves have been brought up in the same way. But a
consideration which ought of itself to be sufficient, is