HINTS TO HOUSE-KEEPERS.

Observer, Volume 7, Issue 236, 21 March 1885, Page 14

HINTS TO HOUSE-KEEPERS.

Go to house -keeping as soon as you are married. If you can't get a mansion, get a flat ; if you can't get a flat, get a cottage in a back street. No matter how small it may be, have a place that is all your own, and that you can call your home. Don't go and board with your mother-in-law because she offers to take you cheap. That is the greatest mistake any man ever made. Get out and start in on your own hook. You will make ludicrous mistakes, and all the neighbours will roar with laughter, and tell you about the mistakes they made when they commenced. No woman was ever a perfect house-keeper at the start ; but if she waited to become perfect without practice or experience, she would wait all her life in vain. At the beginning you will order three hundred oysters for four persons ; you will try to light wood with coal ; you will hangthings out in the rain to dry ; you will put the ivory-handled knives in hot Avater ; you will shine the silverware with the oxalic acid intended to polish up the boiler ; you will use your best flat-iron to drive nails in the wall ; you will pry up tacks with the carvingknife ; you will open cans with the hatchet, and trim lamps with the can-opener ; you will remove corks with the forks and break off a prong every time, and you will use the potato masher Avheuever you want to mash the dog. The butcher wili sell you his stalest cuts at top price, and you won't weigh it after it comes home to see how many ounces short it is. But you will learn better after awhile. Wh en you have been house-keeping a year you will know that mutton doesn't come off a calf, and corned beef off a sea-cow. The best way to learn house-keeping is to commence prepared to make mistakes. You can learn more about house-keeping in one day's experience than you can in a hundred books on the subject. What is the use of studying anything that you are sure to learn better without study? Besides, you can learn a great many things that are not down in the books. You are never taught by a book on housekeeping that the head of the stairs is the wrong place to keep the toilet-soap ; but when you startforthe breakfast-table some morning, and put your heel on the cake oi soap that is waiting for you at the top, and go all the way down in one step, you come to the conclusion that the top of the stairs is not where the soap belongs. And this great truth becomes more indelibly impressed on your mind than if you read it fifty thousand times in a domestic guide-book. The house-Icoeping guide-book doesn't call upon you to counsel die girl not to light the fire with kerosine ; but after one girl has tried it you know the folly of such a proceeding better and more lastingly than if y OU had learned it out of a book. Kerosine is all right when you don't fool with it yourself. Let the girl fool with it as much as she pleases. If she succeeds in lighting the wood, well and good. If she doesn't, you have a nice hole in the roof for a new chimney. ■ „; •.•:-'. " ; Don't be too particular about having your house furnished in the latest style. If you can't afford the latest style, denounce the latest style as modern and vulgar. Get all the old things you can at a second-hand store, and people will think you're aesthetic. Everything will breathe antiquity, and give you the air of being cultured and refined. Every time your boy kicks off the paint it ■will add to its antiquity and value. After

you have worn it and battered it a bout f o r eight or ten years, it will be wort li m ore than it was when new. When your furniture begins to get threadbare and unpresentable, have ifc covered with muslin, and everyone will think it is covered with costly satin, too rich for the light of day. If you have some cheap p ictures that are not sky-high works of art, drape them heavily with mosquito-netting, and the chance visitor will think they are by the old masters.