part of the time in your house there seems
to a looker-on to be nothing to do. You rise in the morning and despatch
your husband, father, and brothers to the farm or wood-lot; you go
sociably about chatting with each other, while you skim the milk, make
the butter, turn the cheeses. The forenoon is long; it's ten to one that
all the so-called morning work is over, and you have leisure for an
hour's sewing or reading before it is time to start the
dinner-preparations. By two o'clock your house-work is done, and you
have the long afternoon for books, needle-work, or drawing,--for perhaps
there is among you one with a gift at her pencil. Perhaps one of you
reads aloud while the others sew, and you manage in that way to keep up
with a great deal of reading. I see on your book-shelves Prescott,
Macaulay, Irving, besides the lighter fry of poems and novels, and, if I
mistake not, the friendly covers of the "Atlantic." When you have
company, you invite Mrs. Smith or Brown or Jones to tea; you have no
trouble; they come early, with their knitting or sewing; your particular
crony sits with you by your polished stove while you watch the baking of
those light biscuits and tea-rusks for which you are so famous, and Mrs.
Somebody-else chats with your sister, who is spreading the table with
your best china in the best room. When tea is over, there is plenty of
volunteering to help you wash your pretty India teacups, and get them
back into the cupboard. There is no special fatigue or exertion in all
this, though you have taken down the best things and put them back,
because you have done all without anxiety or effort, among those who
would do precisely the same, if you were their visitors.

But now comes down pretty Mrs. Simmons and her pretty daughter to spend
a week with you, and forthwith you are troubled. Your youngest, Fanny,
visited them in New York last fall, and tells you of their cook and
chambermaid, and the servant in white gloves that waits on table. You
say in your soul, "What shall we do? they never can be contented to live
as we do; how shall we manage?" And now you long for servants.

This is the very time that you should know that Mrs. Simmons is tired to
death of her fine establishment, and weighed down with the task of
keeping the peace among her servants. She is a quiet soul, dearly loving
her ease, and hating strife; and yet last week she had five quarrels to
settle between her invaluable cook and the other membe