The American Country Girl

A scheme for the equipment of a modern kitchen follows, with, again, the proviso that the young woman must adapt it to her own needs by careful study of her conditions:

Equipment for a Farm Kitchen

FURNITURE

UTENSILS

Granite or aluminum

Wire-ware

Tinware

Ironware

Japannedware

Woodenware

Hardware

Earthenware and Glass

LINEN

MISCELLANEOUS

It is not claimed that this list is imperative for each and every girl. She must adapt it to her special needs. It is merely a typical list. And if the young woman who reads and ponders it does not know how to adapt it to her own needs, she certainly is not fitted to undertake her own housekeeping. She should go to some school where young women are trained in household science and there study the science of utensils and the chemistry of cooking and cleaning, and the whole science and art of home-making.

The list may seem a long one; but when the appliances and utensils are placed before the adequately prepared young woman, she will have a sensation not of discouragement but of delight. To make every young woman realize that if she has adequate preparation she can feel perfectly at home in a house with an industrious little motor at its heart from which will go forth the miracle of an invisible force that will bring every part of the work to magical completion without any effort of ours and that thus what once was drudgery may be turned into a delight,—this is the problem that stands with expectant, perhaps ominous, eyes at our doorway; ominous if we show an unwelcoming look, expectant if we give it greeting and stand ready to take this friend to our heart.

Everything in this world is good. The great god Power led the woman out of her House and into the Factory. It was necessary in order that she should have a chance to learn the rules of the game. Now, her lesson learned, the same great god Power is quietly but firmly taking her again by the hand and leading her back to her House. There she will dwell; and there she will again attempt to create that divine reflection of heaven which we call Home. Now that she is once more allowed to undertake this task, let us hope that she will be successful in building up an institution worthy of the scientific age in which she lives, illuminated with electric beams that shall beat into every rat hole and every germ-protecting dark corner, and with every conceivable energy-producing and conserving device that can be planned by the human mind.

CHAPTER XII

VOICES IN THE HOUSEHOLD

Upon the shelf the clock ticks merrily;
The kettle sings his song in drowsy mood;
Within the stove crackles the fragrant wood;
The coffee-mill grinds out a cheerful lay.
Surely within the oven one can see
A roast ... what else on earth would smell so good?...
And little globes of fat, all amber-hued,
Dance in the pan and sing with noisy glee.
Sweet sounds! Inviting yet another song;
And I will sing in unison with them.
Work brings the joy that helps the work along,
And so, harmonious, sounds the kitchen hymn.
While all about the ready dinner-table
The children's voices raise a merry babel.

Helen Coale Crew.

CHAPTER XII

THE HOUSEHOLD LABORATORY

The kitchen should be a combination of laboratory, machine shop and studio. The work done there is just as complex as that! There are an almost infinite number of different things needed to accomplish the different processes that have to be carried on in this workshop. There must be a variety of mechanical devices to negotiate and subtly maneuver all the effects that are to be brought out to artistic and wholesome conclusions.

This is true to a great extent nowadays in all households whether in city or country. But the farm is yet, as it always was, a place where there is greater complexity to master because many more things are done there. The spirit of machinery has entered into the life of the city kitchen and eased the burden; it must now enter the country household and work the same magic there.

If the kitchen is to be a combination laboratory and machine shop it must look like one. It must be filled with appliances for every part of the intricate work of making ten thousand things that are needed for the family through the various seasons and changes of the year.

Imagine an exquisite room long and narrow. The walls are painted white or light gray—a warm golden gray for the relief and pleasing of the eye. The floor is comfortable to the feet, sanitary, easily cleansed and durable. There is an iron ring in the floor where the cover to the chute is lifted down which the dust is to be thrown. There is another for the ash chute, lined with metal for protection from fire by means of the hot coals that may sometimes be left in the ashes. One beauty of the electric stove is that it produces no ashes; one advantage of the vacuum cleaner is that it does away with dust.

The sink has two compartments—all enameled white—one for the washing of the dishes and one for the draining. In the second is the wire drainer. The sink is placed at the right height for this particular housewife, be she a little treasure done up in a small parcel or a tall stately woman when standing very straight—as every one ought to, whether city or country bred.

At the right of the sink there is a table or shelf for the dishes as they are taken from the wheeled tray that has brought them from the dining table, and at the left is the draining sink or draining board or a shelf on which the dishes may be laid when they have been dried with the linen drying cloth.

There is a window before the worker and from it she can look out over the garden off to the fields, and beyond toward the village, following her thoughts now and then to the great big world outside.

When an ideal like this is held up before their eyes, the younger women see the futility and bad policy of the old methods. For it is the worst policy to lay heavier burdens upon man or beast than he can carry. It is better policy to conserve the strength of the beast of burden whether horse or daughter. The farmer has found that labor-saving utensils and appliances are his best investment in the barn. Why not in the house? Running water is needed for the dairy stalls; but it is more necessary in the pantry. The live stock in the kitchen is of a fiber incomparably delicate and fine. It will be good for the big brother to scrub that floor; and everything the father and the brother can do to sustain the struggle of the mother and the sister will come back to them with rich interest in the value of the product, viz., the health, happiness and vibrancy of the women in the home and the power to give out energy in their home life and to their children.

The young woman of to-day takes it into account that she will probably have to deal with a scheme of life that does not include service in the household laboratory other than that of her own hands. She realizes that there will never be a peasant class in this country; and she sees that housewives must take the consequences of this happy lack: namely, they must do their own work. Every woman will be always as good as every other woman and therefore there can be no servant in our kitchen; there cannot even be "help."

What then shall be done? There must be fit machinery. The drudgery point must be reduced till labor becomes a joy. The kitchen is not to be a place to which the housewife is condemned; it is a place she is going to love because it is a laboratory where science has sway, where aseptical cleanness reduces every process to a fragrant dream, and the laws of processes appear as miracles of nature controlled at last by the art of man.

Seeing all this clearly, it is not strange that the young woman decides to relegate the bad kitchen to the limbo of broken and disused furniture. This, to her, is the impossible kitchen: one that has no shelves, drawers, or cupboards, and no place where things can be put away; or if there are any shelves, they are made so wide that things have to be stored in behind each other so that the first row must be taken out in order to get at something behind. In this impossible kitchen the pantry is on the wrong side for the worker. By the arrangement of doors and windows light and air are shut out. The rotten old wooden sink is bad smelling, too low, and too narrow, and it is so far from the pantry that the worker will have to go back and forth ten times as many times to do a piece of work as she would if the articles were conveniently placed. The room is too large; there is many times as much walking as is necessary; it is as far removed as it possibly can be from the compact convenience of the ideal kitchen. The floor is uneven and there are broken splinters where the wood has worn. They catch the dust, and little bits of string drag along from them to catch more dust and dirt. It is impossible that this floor should ever be clean; the very thought of it is discouraging. The water must be brought from an outside well, and the wood from an outdoors wood-pile. If it is a rainy day, the wood is wet and takes a long time to get to burning in the range. It is not a range—it is only a stove and a poor one at that.

There are many other things that might be said about the impossible kitchen, but perhaps it is not necessary to go any further, for has not everybody seen one? The great majority of kitchens are now impossible. The great majority should be torn out before any more machinery is bought for the farm business, and a full kitchen equipment should be installed in the place of the worn-out floors, the ill-adapted furniture, the cracked and rusted hardware, the soaked and disease-laden woodwork, and the leaky pipes and shingles.

When the daughter in the country home sees that the father and mother are working together for one end, that they have for the good of all undertaken a task that is too great for them, and that they are oppressed and almost despairing in their fight against untoward circumstances, she is ready to join in the struggle and to give her sometimes slender strength to help in the lifting; but when it becomes evident that the old unsanitary kitchen of the average farm home could be renovated and made the workshop of joyous efficiency instead of the treadmill of despairing burden-bearing; and when at the same time she sees additions constantly made to the greater efficiency of the farming side of the farmstead business, the daughter feels with the mother that their work does not have the appreciation that it deserves. And this is what puts the one little drop of bitterness into the cup she has to drink. There is nothing like this to take the tuck out of one. To know that there exist means to reduce the time limit for a certain piece of work from four hours to twenty minutes and that these means are stubbornly and constantly denied to the worker, takes the poetry and the hope out of her heart and the buoyancy out of her joints more than anything else could. Especially is this the effect when the chains are being hung in the new barn to swing the feed along the passageway to every stall, all to save the strength of the men's arms, and no chains and pulleys are being strung in the kitchen to lift pails and swing loads for the mother and sister. To know that the time spent in dishwashing for a family of five could be reduced from six hours distributed through two days to forty-two minutes at one time in one morning—and then to have to go on interminably giving three separate hours daily to this loathsome, lukewarm, greasy, unsanitary, ill-assorted, deadening task—no, the next group of household administrators will not do that!

It is not that the younger women are lazy and inclined to shirk the heavy tasks. That is not their spirit. But they cannot keep up their fine buoyancy of mind and heart when better methods are constantly going into the barn and none into the house; when appliances are bought for cattle and none for the women. And they know that life will not be held up to its high level if they cannot command buoyancy of spirit.

Life is framed on a larger pattern nowadays; there is a greater demand for standard; there is a higher degree of intelligence required. All this the new young woman sees that she has to do and be. She springs to meet the situation—but hanging at her heels is a chain, the chain of old-fashioned methods. She must be free of this chain, or she will not sustain the burden of country life in the time to come. She thinks she sees a way out in the industrial opportunity of the town. It is a mirage—but she follows it. She follows it and follows it—and what is the end to be? Would it not pay us to give her the opportunity to put the housekeeping for the next generation of home-makers on a better foundation and thus keep these finest of the girls of the nation in the environment they love but now find unendurable because they cannot under present conditions have the help they need?

The papers and periodicals for women nowadays devote long columns to telling us how to make some kind of contraption that will take the place of a fireless cooker or of a movable tray or of some other new housekeeping device. It is true that woman may use her ingenuity to make something that will "do."

But we have been too long getting on with half-measures, makeshifts, contraptions of all sorts. The star we should now hitch our wagon to is an electric motor. The young woman who wishes to live on the farm would better enter some industrial field, make something commercially and with efficiency, sell it, and find in her hands the fifteen dollars for the fireless, the eleven for the double-decker wheeled-tray, and pretty soon the larger sum that will be needed to install a perfect kitchen, that will not only be a joy to herself but will be a lesson to her whole community, that will lift the whole region into a new realization of life, that will show how the time necessary to be spent on the drudgery of the household may be reduced from eighteen hours a day to two, and so release her energies as to give to the higher needs of the family and to the equally great needs of the community the services that she alone is fitted to give, and that are absolutely necessary to the well-being and the safeguarding of the life of the rural realm and therefore also of the whole people.

How can we get a kitchen like that? Well, that is the Gordian knot that the farm daughters will be able to cut. They can do it—they must do it. Every instinct of patriotism, every breathing of passion for the welfare of the future homes, every thought of affection for the home circle that will be theirs, calls for the most valiant struggle to gain the goal—a perfectly hygienic, perfectly fitted household plant, with all in it that can by scientific mechanism be placed there, to be the perfect working basis for that highest product, human happiness in a human home.

CHAPTER XIII

Theodore Roosevelt.

CHAPTER XIII

EFFICIENT ADMINISTRATION

If the Country Girl of the future takes her life in her hands and asks for a household laboratory such as has been described, she must make sure also that she will be able to work in that place in such a way as to get the most good out of it and to prove its value to those that have installed it for her. This presupposes a high degree of efficiency in herself as well as in the tools she handles.

Never has young womanhood been so fortunate in opportunities for preparation as is the girl of this day. The very minutes seem to bristle with the word "efficiency." On every side she may receive suggestion and instruction as to how to make herself consonant with her era. Scientific management is being carried out in every sort of factory, workshop, studio, regiment,—everywhere,—with the one exception, perhaps, of her own, the household workshop. Therefore it is for her to see what scientific management means to all these other institutions and to apply the lesson to her own realm, and make that factory of hers, that workshop, regiment, and studio, into the most efficient place upon earth!

The great movement in the interest of efficiency has its origin in the desire to get just as much result as possible out of the labor of the workers. Their strength must be conserved, not because of any philanthropic feeling for the man, but because that strength is needed for further use, in order that a greater output of the product may be gained. The method employed is to consider studiously the movements made in carrying on any one part of the work. They separate this operation into its elements, and then they determine upon the best motions to make to accomplish the end, and upon the exact order of those motions, shaving off a part of a second here and there by the careful choosing of motions and the surest order of them. The motions the workman makes, whether with eyes, fingers or arms, are thus economized. The bricks for the building up of the wall are conveniently placed, and all the details in following any pattern are fitted together so as to make as few motions as possible, to use as little energy as possible, and to reach the end as quickly as possible. This is, says one, "the application of the conservation principle to production." "The art of management," says another of these experts, "is knowing exactly what you want the men to do, and then seeing that they do it in the best and cheapest way." In order to accomplish all this in, say, the business and work of a factory, there must be an efficiency engineer, who shall spend days and weeks and months in finding out what the right order of motions is, what the best arrangement of the tools and materials shall be, what elimination of unnecessary acts and things can be made in order that every possible waste of energy may be pared off and the path to the end may be absolutely, sternly direct. Then there is the route clerk, who sees that this order is followed by each man until he is able to do it involuntarily and as if by instinct. To make definite record of the success of this work, the time-and-cost clerk will keep track of time and per cent. items, and make known exactly what are the results of doing things in one particular way. If not satisfactory, another way must be chosen.

It is the belief of the advocates of scientific management that if we thus make the individual efficient, his productive capacity will be raised twenty-five or fifty per cent., or even sometimes doubled.

Scientific management calls for a careful study of the surroundings. The appliances must be adequate, comfortable, handy, and such as require the least percentage of rest. The scaffold or bench must be the exact height to make as little strain as possible on the worker. The table must be made at the right height so that the worker will not have to stoop over for his tools. If he works on his feet, there must be something for him to stand against so that he may have no fear of falling. To get the full output, the right appliances must be devised, standardized, used, and maintained. The worker's clothing must not be ill-fitting, or it may restrict the movement of his arms and hands. It must be of such material that he will not be in constant fear of ruining it. Everything about him must be such as to increase speed and not restrict motion. Nothing that will affect the eyesight unpleasantly is to be tolerated. There shall be no reflecting surfaces from which the light may shine into the eyes. The colors that will help the eyes are to be selected for the room, those that are pleasant, that will induce a happy mood and will therefore decrease irritation and help the spirit of energy. He must take up the nearest tools first; the pockets and containers to hold tools must be placed so that the least and shortest motions may be made in handling them. And so on.

There are several reasons why the work of the kitchen has not been more promptly attacked by the believer in scientific management. In the first place, the business of the home laboratory is of so complex a nature that no factory can compare with it in difficulty of analysis. Efficient housekeeping is a combination of many factories. The scientific expert can far more easily separate the making of a single pair of shoes into its forty-three acts than he can analyze any one of the processes of the home laboratory: say, for instance, the making of a frosted layer-cake, the assembling and concocting of a mince-pie, or the infinitely complex business of washing dishes.

In the second place, men have been fairly busy putting this matter through in their factories. They have naturally studied out the processes nearest to their own hands. They are not to be specially blamed for inattention to the woman's realm. That will come next. Now that their attention is being called to the need for expert management in the other department of life, they are recommending in many books and lectures what should and must be done to put housekeeping on a basis for efficiency. So if women do not standardize their work, men will do it for them, and that will not be so well for them as if they did it themselves.

The woman who is administrator in the farm home must be equal to several women. She must be master in the difficult art of cookery, adapting her menu to the welfare of a group of people of all ages and with all kinds of needs. She must be washwoman and laundry woman, cleaning and scrub woman. She must know all the proper chemicals to be applied to the cleansing of different kinds of metal, cloth, wood, and every sort of surface painted and unpainted. She must be food expert, and textile expert, medicine and poison expert. Besides all this, she must be teacher, instructor, and entertainer, the encyclopedia and gazetteer, a theological and philosophical professor. And all these separate functions must do their work together within the one personality, the administrator, the little mother of the home, the companion of the kitchen, the parlor and the bedside.

Translated into technical engineering language this women in the heart of the farmstead is her own route-clerk, and order-of-work clerk; she is her own instruction-card clerk, time-and-cost clerk, gang boss, speed boss, repair boss, and inspector. All these and much more must she be in order to gain the effects of scientific management in that factory which is her home realm.

Theodore Roosevelt said, "When we get efficiency in all our industries and commercial ventures, national efficiency will be a fact." Does he include the farm laboratory among the "industries"? The farm home is producing (or ought to produce) the most valuable product that can be found in the country—the man and woman of the future. If these men and women are to be efficient, the home from which they are to come must certainly be a model of efficiency. We have to pierce through the crust of our national conceit and find there the truth that our people are painfully in need of more efficiency and that therefore it is a matter of the most vital concern that we should put the home in all its phases into a condition more adapted for producing the perfectly efficient human product.

The Gospel of Efficiency has reached the farmer; he finds that with three men he can do the work that fifteen men did forty years ago. He realizes that the efficient farmer progresses, the inefficient falls behind.

Will not the same thing be true of woman in the farmstead?

To see how the principle of efficiency may be applied in the work of the farmstead, we have but to look, for instance, at that task of dish washing. Suppose that the worker were piling the dishes at the right of the dishpan and also trying to drain them at the same side. The efficiency expert would promptly decide that this arrangement would cause a waste of time and energy, for while the right hand was ready to lift the dishes to be washed into the pan, the left would have to move back and forth in many unnecessary motions to put the dishes back into the draining rack which was also on the right. The efficiency clerk would demand that the dishes be drained at the left. If there were some article of furniture at the right, so that the dishes could not be placed there, say a pump or a door or a cupboard, that would have to be removed. If the time and strength and nervous energy of those workers were to be conserved and the product to be put forth with the least expenditure of mind and nerve, such changes would have to be made as would make labor-saving motions possible. Not to make the changes would be bad policy, because these conditions would be constantly causing waste of time and strength; and that time and that strength would be of pecuniary worth to the business. What business? The important business of administering the affairs of the home!

Every Country Girl should experiment to see how she can economize motions and save time. She should make a study of every part of her work and see where she can by forethought cut down useless movements and intensify energy. If at first she finds difficulty, she should persevere; she will master the task in time. There is a knack about it that she must master before she can become adept.

If, for instance the hair is being done up in a new way, it takes a longer time than usual the first day, less time the next, and after a few more days the new way takes no longer than the old. Some natural motions have been found out that economize the time and effort, that introduce convenient moves, that shake off awkwardnesses, and set the whole into a rhythm of motion.

Josephine Preston Peabody has written a lovely poem about a child watching her mother as she braids her hair. The child is delighted with the deftness of her mother's hands, and with the perfect rightness of the braids as every loop comes into its place and all of them are so quickly and so beautifully fitted about the head. That mother had by long practise found the exactly right way to manage that complicated piece of human industry, the "doing up" of a mass of long and wavy hair. She did it almost without thought. Her "motions" were perfectly smooth, exquisitely graceful, and adapted absolutely to the end desired through a series of separate acts composing all together a whole scientific process. And she was so accustomed to it as a whole and to all the separate details, that she could do it with a rhythm that was like music. When it was done she could give one little final pat and say, "There!" with a slight thrill of delight.

Just so should it be with any of the intricate operations of the household laboratory. Just such a thrill of delight should be possible when the complicated piece of hand-work and machine-work called washing the dishes is finished. At the end one should be able to express a delighted "There!"—not because a dreaded and abhorrent quarter-of-an-hour was over, but because a piece of work necessary to human welfare has been turned off with firm conclusiveness and dispatch.

The inefficient way of doing things is a too frequent experience. A farm housekeeper will bring a dish of cold potatoes from the kitchen, carry it all the way through the dining-room, set it down on a chair while she opens the door to the cellar, carry it haltingly down the stairs, and then set it down on a box because it is too dark to place it in the cupboard where it belongs. She does not want to take the pains to get a lamp, but she has to. She carefully lights the lamp, carries it down the cellar stairs, places it in a safe place, and then takes care of the potatoes. Then she comes back and carries a little plate of bacon that has been left and deposits it in the same careful way. Then follow the bread, the milk and the cream in pitchers; follow the cake, the jam, and many other things in little precious bits too good to be thrown away, all requiring a careful passage, each one at a time. It is good that she has so many beautiful and promising things to put away; but how different it would have been if she had been able to load all these things on the dummy and with one stroke of the arm to move it all downstairs. Then, O joy! if she had had the electric light to turn on in the cellar-way and down in the cellar cupboard, she could have gone downstairs with perfect safety and without fear, and she could have returned with a light heart, swung the wheeled tray into its place, and all would have been over in three minutes at the most, instead of taking twenty-five and being accomplished only by a vast expenditure of effort and nervous fear. The money that woman wasted in reduced energy and nervousness causing doctor's bills, would have bought her a wheeled tray, put in a dummy with pulley, rope, and weights, and paid the family doctor's bill besides! Nothing can be done hygienically that is done in the dark.

The Country Girl may practise for efficiency while she is waiting for her perfect kitchen to materialize, by doing all in her power to make herself save steps. To learn to make no useless passages across the floor is to begin a conquest of one's own mind, to establish self-control, and to utilize forethought.

"Think twice and step once," was a good motto. There is a one best way to do all things. Why not search for it?

CHAPTER XIV

Ill Housewifery pricketh herself up with pride;
Good Housewifery tricketh her house as a bride.

Ill Housewifery lieth till ten of the clock;
Good Housewifery trieth to rise with the cock.

Penny Magazine, 1798.

CHAPTER XIV

AN OLD-FASHIONED VIRTUE

This may be considered a brief for the "old maid" of olden time; or rather for the quality that she stands for in our dream and story life. We have not given this so-called "old-maidishness" its rightful place among the virtues. The quality deserves to be classified among the highest expressions of the intellect. In the olden time, when the mother was busy with her family of from two to twenty children, the mother's unmarried sister was the "efficiency-clerk" of the big household. She was the motor, the balance-wheel; she knew where everything was, to the last sheaf of catnip; she put everything in its place and could go and get whatever was wanted. Behind all this was her classifying mind.

That "old-maidishness" was composed of three elements: a fine discrimination of values, an appreciation of little things as pivots for greater things, and a love of orderliness. To her the first law of heaven was her first law. Heaven never had a law till it had order; and when the stars found that there was to be something more than a fortuitous concourse of atoms in the universe, we know what they did: they sang. In any house there will be more singing when orderliness reigns there. But the household is a concourse of myriads of parts. We cannot always sing that the house "is so full of a number of things" that we think we "should all be as happy as kings." It is only when we can keep good track of these things that we can be "as happy as kings." This was a large part of the mission of the invaluable old maid in our early centuries.

There was a great deal of system in the housekeeping of our ancestors. Bags, basket and bundles were trained into the service of good order. They cross-stitched numbers on the pillow-slips and on the sheets and on the rare napery they had spun and woven with their own capable hands and had bleached on their own soft grass-plots. They kept their "simples" in carefully protected and distinctly labeled sheaves. Their piece-bags were innumerable. They could go in the dark into the storeroom, put their hand in behind things, feel unerringly for what they needed, and find it there.

The burden upon the memory that this elaborate system of old must have entailed is now transferred to the card catalog. This invaluable modern device is a system for recording upon cards of a certain uniform size the items and lists and notes to be remembered and preserved, and of classifying them carefully for ready reference. These cards are stood up in a closely packed row, in a box or drawer, or in a compartment made especially for the purpose, where they are arranged alphabetically or by subjects, in such a way as to be easily run over by the finger till the desired card is found. The cards must be made of stiff paper or card-board; they must be accurately cut to a required measure, usually five inches wide by three inches tall, and they must be fitted exactly into the box, with "guides" to aid in finding the main subjects. The "guide" is a card of a different color from the others, usually yellow, and has a little top extension, so that when the guide is put in its place in the row of white cards, this top extension will stand up above the others so as to catch the eye readily. On this little bit of the guide that stands up above the rest, a main heading is written very clearly in fine lettering,—or, better, printed neatly—and on all the cards that are selected to be slipped in behind that guide are written the notes or references on subjects that belong under that heading. For instance, suppose the main heading, written on a certain guide, should be this: "Recipes." Then each card that follows that guide would have written on its face the details of some recipe—one recipe to one card. And all the cards on which the housekeeper had written the recipes she wished to preserve would be placed behind that guide. Then whenever she wished to use any one recipe, she would open her drawer, look along the tops of the cards until she found the guide extension—the little projecting piece that had the word "Recipes" on it. Behind that guide she would find all her recipes; then it would be but the work of an instant to pick out the one she wanted. On each separate card would be written in the upper right-hand corner, the name of the recipe on that card. If the housekeeper had a great many recipes, she might make more guides: one for cake recipes, one for bread, and so forth.

Then there would be still other main heads. One might be marked "Inventory." One might be called "Clothing." Records of music, of engagements, of books, and so forth might be set down. Any subject that needed to be kept track of could be thus securely noted in the card catalog.

Under the heading "Inventory" a most useful record might be made. Subordinate headings on cards of some other color should be used. The first of these would be "Parlor." Behind that would be placed the cards that told all the articles of furniture or decoration that that important room contained. "Dining-room," "Kitchen," "Pantry," etc., would come along in order and all items considered worthy of note would be put on their proper cards. Then there would be other cards entitled "Linen-closet," "Side-board," "Old Bureau," "Old Chest," "Black Trunk," "Brown Trunk," "Old-fashioned Deep Basket," or other containers of clothing, silver, bedding, linen, utensils, or treasures of any kind. In case of fire, the card catalog, along with the locked document box or safe, would be one of the things to be sought for first and rescued from harm. In fact there should by rights be two copies of any household inventory made, so that in case the inventory in the house should chance to be burned with the house, there might still be a careful record preserved in some safe place for future reference, for purposes of insurance or for historic archives. Every one of us should think of the family as an institution of dignity, one whose smallest doings have importance, because we belong to a great human family, and because we are bearing on the touch of life to future generations. We are now making history. And we should see to it that our link of the unending chain should not break for want of a sensible and accurate recorder.

This description of the card catalog is given with so much particularity because it has been proved by long experience that it is a very great saving of trouble to have it exactly right. The making of the cards is a matter of the nicest care. This exactitude is essential to the quick movement of the fingers and is therefore a saving of time in hunting for the one card desired. The jelly may be almost ready to "jell," and one may run to the catalog of recipes to find what is the matter; one must not be impeded an instant at that critical point. Time is always precious, too, to the housekeeper, and the orderliness that makes it possible to find things quickly is one of the most important elements in the success of the new housekeeping.

Whatever part the daughter in the farm home may have in the business of the farm, she will find the card catalog of the utmost value to her in making herself useful and in placing her results on the basis of authority. In such a system of records she can always find what she wants on demand; the various accounts can be added to and taken from and corrected to date at any moment without recopying the whole. So the records of the daily egg-harvest can be kept, the in-come and out-go of any of the products of the farm, the weighing and testing of the milk, the mending and making of fences, the apple harvest, the dates for putting in crops, the dates of payments to the men and the number of their days' labor, and many other items that belong to the business of the farm. Of course when the farm business becomes very large and intricate, an elaborate system of bookkeeping is necessary. But for the myriads of little things that belong to the home side of the farmstead, this ingenious system is especially adapted. Here we may advantageously keep our records of such memoranda as specially concerns the family, the household accounts and receipts; inventions we may hear about and new devices in which we may be interested and that we may sometime want to find out about or make our own; contents of the tool chest, dates of repairs and memoranda of things that need to be repaired about the house; cans of fruit and other things stored away on the shelves and in the cupboards of the cellar and in the cold room and elsewhere—a valuable record to check up against another year's yield of these treasures; doctor's visits and prescriptions, notes of symptoms, together with dates and any circumstances that may need to be accurately remembered; music, victrola records; Christmas and birthday gifts given or received; dates of events, the coming and going of guests at the home; personal items such as the size of shoes, gloves, collars, hats, etc., for the different members of the family; books we should like to have; newspapers and magazines taken or desired; records of the magazine club or of the book loan club; correspondence, letters received and sent; patterns, clippings, quotations. For remembering all these things the card catalog will prove the unfailing helper; and all and many more will be the care of the Country Girl when she becomes administrator of a household in the new time.

A simple bookkeeping may also be recorded in the card catalog. The monthly or seasonal or annual statements of expenses may be recorded here, however, and may be kept for comparison with other seasons and years. These records may be placed under the following heads: