to a laundry; and being attended to by those who make that
department of labor a specialty, it comes home in refreshingly beautiful
order.

"We in America, though we pride ourselves on our Yankee thrift, are far
behind the French in domestic economy. If all the families of a
neighborhood should put together the sums they separately spend in
buying or fitting up and keeping in repair tubs, boilers, and other
accommodations for washing, all that is consumed or wasted in soap,
starch, bluing, fuel, together with the wages and board of an extra
servant, the aggregate would suffice to fit up a neighborhood laundry,
where one or two capable women could do easily and well what ten or
fifteen women now do painfully and ill, and to the confusion and
derangement of all other family processes.

"The model laundries for the poor in London had facilities which would
enable a woman to do both the washing and ironing of a small family in
from two to three hours, and were so arranged that a very few women
could with ease do the work of the neighborhood.

"But in the absence of an establishment of this sort, the housekeepers
of a country village might help themselves very much by owning a mangle
in common, to which all the heavier parts of the ironing could be sent.
American ingenuity has greatly improved the machinery of the mangle. It
is no longer the heavy, cumbersome structure that it used to be in the
Old World, but a compact, neat piece of apparatus, made in three or four
different sizes to suit different-sized apartments.

"Mr. H. F. Bond of Waltham, Massachusetts, now manufactures these
articles, and sends them to all parts of the country. The smallest of
them does not take up much more room than a sewing-machine, can be
turned by a boy of ten or twelve, and thus in the course of an hour or
two the heaviest and most fatiguing part of a family ironing may be
accomplished.

"I should certainly advise the 'Young Family Man' with a delicate wife
and uncertain domestic help to fortify his kitchen with one of these
fixtures.

"But after all, I still say that the quarter to which I look for the
solution of the American problem of domestic life is a wise use of the
principle of association.

"The future model village of New England, as I see it, shall have for
the use of its inhabitants not merely a town lyceum-hall and a town
library, but a town laundry, fitted up with conveniences such as no
private house can afford, and payi