hese suggestions are but hints as to daily management. First and
foremost, Mary must learn to systematize her work. Method and
management do wonders toward saving time and money. Some housewives
are always in a hurry and their work is never done, while others with
twice as much to do never seem flurried, and have time for writing,
sewing and reading. The secret of the success of the latter class lies
in that one golden word--METHOD.

I hope the young housekeepers to whom this talk is addressed will not
consider such trifles as I have mentioned, degrading. It is the work
laid before them and consequently cannot be mean. Such labor, when
sweetened by the thought of what it all means, is ennobling. I know
that Keats tells us that:

"Love in a hut with water and a crust,
Is--Love forgive us!--cinders, ashes, dust!"

If Love were really there, "cinders, ashes, dust" could not be, and the
water and crust may, by our Mary's skillful treatment, be transformed
into a refreshing beverage and an appetizing _entree_. My faith in the
powers of John's wife is great, and if John be satisfied, and tells her
that he has the best little love-mate and housekeeper in the world, can
she complain?

CHAPTER V.

A MISTAKE ON JOHN'S PART.

It is not discreditable to the sex to assert that a man is first
attracted marriage-ward by the desire of the eye. He falls in love, as a
rule, because she who presently becomes the only woman in the universe
to him is goodly to view, if not actually beautiful. Goodliness being
largely contingent upon apparel, it follows that Mary dresses for
John--up to the marriage-day. He who descries signs of slatternliness in
his beloved prior to that date, may well be shocked to disillusionment.
As a girl in a home where the mother takes upon herself the heaviest
work, and spares her pretty daughter's hands and clothes all the soil
and wear she can avert, Mary must be indolent or phenomenally
indifferent to what occupies so much of other women's thoughts, if she
do not always appear in her lover's presence neatly and--to the best of
her ability--becomingly attired. She quickly acquaints herself with his
taste in the matter of women's costumes, and adapts hers to it, wearing
his favorite colors, giving preference to the gowns he has praised, and
arranging her hair in the fashion he has chanced to admire in her
hearing.

In the work-a-day world of matrimonial life, much of all this
undergoes a change. Wa