Chapter X: Part 10

What each of us needs to do many times a year is to sit down and carefully consider her own work. Does too much time go to one thing and too little to another? Can we omit any of it without harm to anybody? Is there some way of doing this duty more quickly without slighting it? Would such a simple thing as changing the height of the sink, the kitchen table, the wash-bench, save time, strength and aching back? Will a plain shelf or two along the kitchen wall make work easier? Would an hour spent on a carefully planned rearrangement of the kitchen utensils and supplies save many hours during the coming months? There is no end to the useless things one can buy for a kitchen, yet there are many appliances and arrangements that, some in one household, some in another, will pay for themselves many times over in a year. Read advertisements, papers, magazines—you can glance through the advertisement pages in a very few minutes—perhaps go to demonstrations by agents of practical devices for lightening housework. Notice what your friends are using. Look much and buy little. But keep yourself awake to new ideas, and now and then when you are sure of your ground adopt some of them. Where there is no outlay of money necessary try frequent experiments, but not many at a time. If any of your family or friends are of an inventive turn of mind, call them in for consultation. The most valuable inventions are the simplest ones.

You cannot believe all you read or hear about, but you can generally believe your own eyes if you use them carefully. Go to those of your friends who seem to manage their work well. If they have any utensils or appliances that actual experience has proved good investments, note them carefully. Maybe you or some of your family can make something that answers the same purpose. If not, sleep on the question and if your judgment still says that it will pay in the end to get it, try hard to raise the money. Even on a basis of dollars and cents it may pay in the long run. And it is generally a question of more than money—a question of body, mind and soul.

Note carefully how other good housekeepers manage their work. There is a practical study for you! You have probably watched them many times before this, but now watch them with seeing eyes.

Turn your attention to the tasks that burden you heavily. Here reforms are needed most. You will hardly be ready to assert that you are doing these tasks in the very best way in the world. Find out why not, and then try to improve on the old method.

After you have thought over your work in general sit down some evening and plan out the duties of the next day as far as you know them. Forget how you used to manage. Maybe you will be able to make only one or two small changes the first time. That is a good beginning. Try again later. Keep your wits about you and your thinking-cap on all the time. It will pay.

As the world grows older it accomplishes more in a given time than it used to do. They can make a hundred things now in the time it took to make one fifty years ago. Are you a part of the world and its progress or are you something left behind in the onward march? Not your fault? Well, you can be pretty sure that it is _partly_ your fault and that you can remedy some of it if you only will.

* * * * *

_FREE SUBSCRIPTION_

_Besides the prize for the best story of “heroism at home,” every month another free year’s subscription will be given for the best item or paragraph of any kind for the Department. The two subscriptions will not be given to the same person. The subscription may begin with any number you please._

* * * * *

Someone says that the world’s progress doesn’t concern her off in her little corner—that she has her work to do and that’s all there is to it. Well, perhaps it doesn’t in one way of speaking, but her life is both less happy and less useful than if she let the world’s progress concern her a little. She says it wouldn’t help her any in making biscuit or sweeping the floor if she did know some of the stories of history, how the revolution in Russia is getting on, about the great writers and painters, about anything outside her work. Well, it wouldn’t—in a way. The biscuits wouldn’t be any better nor the floor any cleaner. But any one that isn’t half-witted can learn to sweep a floor or even to bake biscuits. You are, or ought to be, more than a cook and a housemaid. You are a _home-maker_, and though good biscuits and clean floors are very necessary things in any house, they are _not_ enough to make a _home_ out of it. In a true _home_ there must be mental and moral, as well as physical, comfort. You are still something more. You are a woman and a free human being. You have your duties to other people, as everyone has, but, like everyone, you have a duty to _yourself_. You were given a brain and a soul, as well as a body. You can easily see the need of feeding your body: the need of feeding your brain and soul are equally necessary. Why were they given to you? To starve?

No pen, however powerful, no voice, however eloquent, can present in the full force of its true colors the value of intellectual and moral development to the housewife, the woman, the home-maker. Religion is not a subject for our Department. The matter of creed is for each one to settle for herself. But in those questions of ethics and social morals that arise in any household and generally have, after all, their foundation in religion, and in all those questions of intellectual living and growth, this Department of ours does have its field and its purpose.

Why? Because, as I said, a _home_, a _real_ home, has its moral and intellectual sides as well as its material side. Because even its material side, the everyday round of duties, cannot be made what it should be unless brain and soul are made fit to direct the body. Because as wives, mothers, daughters, sisters we are responsible for the members of our family, and for ourselves as human souls. It is not enough to bring a child into the world and then feed it, wash it, dress it, give it a place to sleep, and one day say to it: “We have raised you. Go forth and make your living.” Of course not. We all know that, though goodness knows there are plenty of people who don’t do even that much. It is not enough to furnish a clean, warm house and three meals a day to the bodies of your husband, parents, brothers or sisters. They could get that much at a boarding-house or hotel. They, and you, must have moral and mental food, baths, clothes and beds as well as physical ones—a _home_—not merely a house. We cannot give what we don’t have. To furnish these things to them we must first get them ourselves.

Then we should give heed to moral and intellectual living and growth because it is our _duty_. There is another reason—because it is for our own happiness and pleasure.

It was once my privilege to go over a thousand or two letters from people who, after becoming members of a great and good system of education by correspondence, had written in the fullness of their hearts to tell how it had made their lives brighter and happier and to thank the school, not as much for the knowledge they had acquired from their reading and study at home, but for the great pleasure and joy the _having_ of this knowledge had brought them—for the _new intellectual, social and moral life_ that had come to them with it. The letters came from all over the English-speaking world, but I was most struck by the fact that a large part of them came from housewives. The following is a fair sample of hundreds from farmers’ wives, laborers’ wives, clerks’ wives, business-mens’ wives:

“Life has been a new thing to me since I took up your course.
My housework used to be an awful drudgery—a never-ending grind.
Now it is easy and I do it better, for my mind has _something
outside to think about_ and be interested in.”

The wording wasn’t alike in any two, but, in every one of the hundreds written, there was the same idea—“something outside to think about and be interested in.” This was the note sounded in nearly every one of all the letters from men and women both. Some were women living many miles from the nearest neighbor, some were bed-ridden invalids, some factory girls, some servants, a few fashionable “society women,” some of the men, lonely sheep-herders on the Western plains, some naval officers, some this, some that, but one and all gave thanks from grateful hearts for a lift out of the rut of daily drudgery, for a broader horizon, for greater usefulness. I cried over some of those letters. They came straight from the heart if ever anything did.

That was the voice of _experience_, not the voice of theory. What they could do, we can do. We are not going to have any study courses or any lessons to learn. There will be nothing any of us _has_ to do. But I believe each of us is going to think things over, talk it over and then make herself some spare moments, if she hasn’t some already, and set to work to make life a better thing for herself and those dear to her by getting “something outside to think about.”

How am I going to bring this about? Oh, _I_ am not going to do it—_we_ are! I have no idea of going into any house and saying, “Do that this way, and do this that way.” All of us are going to help by making suggestions, by giving experiences, by offering interesting bits of information. It is for you to decide which of these _you_ can use. The thing to be desired above all others is that each of us may learn to _think for herself_. Many think for themselves very keenly already—perhaps more keenly than I do—and these are the very ones that can help the rest of us most; but we can all think better, if we all think together.

By the next number, April, which will come out March 25, there ought to be a fair number of questions and suggestions from our readers. Don’t forget that the best suggestion or bit of information sent in each month entitles the sender to a year’s free subscription, to any name and address desired. And remember that another free year’s subscription goes every month to the person, man or woman, who sends us the best true story of heroic living in common everyday life. The notices elsewhere in our Department give the particulars.

How are we going to get “something outside to think about?” Well, there are plenty of things outside and there are plenty of ways of bringing them into our lives. Each of us will find some things and some ways—all by herself if she will try and then she can tell the rest of us about them—but in our Department each month we can take one set of things, see whether there isn’t something of value there for us, ask questions, make suggestions, try experiments, offer bits of information, talk about it with our families, think about it while we are working and while we are resting or amusing ourselves, bring new things into our lives. I am not going to set up as a teacher and there isn’t going to be any course of study. There is only one thing I claim to know that some of you don’t know—that we, any of us, can make our lives brighter and more valuable by feeding our minds as well as our bodies. I know this by experience—not only by my own experience and that of my two daughters but also by the experiences of scores and hundreds of other women I have known and, perhaps, helped a little. I never talked to anyone in print before, but for many, many years, ever since one golden day when I discovered that I was actually making my own life happier and fuller and less ugly by an effort to feed my starving mind in my few spare moments, I have never missed a chance to do what I could to show other women how they could get the same blessing for themselves.

In this number we will talk and think about reading and what it can do for us if we go about it right. Next month we will consider woman’s interest in politics. After that there are many more subjects—flowers, trees, gardens, stock, other animals, history and women in history, business and women in business, painting and women artists, women’s clubs and study circles, customs of other nations, food, correspondence courses, music and women musicians, and hundreds of other subjects. I want you to help me select the subjects as we go along.

* * * * *

_IS READING WORTH WHILE?_

“In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in
literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always
modern. New books revive and redecorate new ideas; old books
suggest and invigorate new ideas.”—_Bulwer._

What is reading worth to a busy housewife? “Well,” says one, “it may be worth a good deal, but I haven’t time to find out.” If this woman knew there was a twenty-dollar gold-piece to be picked up at the end of a few minutes walk, would she have time to stop her housework long enough to go and get it?

What can we get by reading? Maybe only rest, amusement and a “change.” Maybe this and also some knowledge. Maybe some valuable experience. Are any of these worth taking time from housework for?

There is surely no need of saying that rest, amusement and change are necessary in the long run for any kind of work. You save time by taking a vacation. Somebody has said that anyone can do twelve months work in eleven, but that no one can do eleven months’ work in twelve, meaning that we can accomplish more in a year by devoting one month of it to a sensible vacation.

There can be no doubt that we can gain much knowledge from books. It is one of the chief sources from which the world gets all that it knows. But is any of this knowledge worth while for a housewife? If anyone doubts it, stop and think. How about the Bible, the newspapers, the cook-book? Is this the only reading from which we can profit? In your own experience surely you can recall at least a few other books that told you something you were glad to know.

How do you get _experience_ from reading? Isn’t it safer to learn human beings and their ways by studying them direct? Yes, and no. It depends on the book. Perhaps the author can tell you in a few hours more real truth about men and women than you can learn alone in years.

We have heard so many queer things about “literature” that we are likely to think of it as fancy things written by a lot of delicate, long-haired men and masculine women and having very little to do with our own everyday lives. Well, there are many over-cultured and over-educated people who would define literature that way. But they are mightily wrong! The _best_ literature is generally simple, not “fancy.”

Literature is the spoken or written record by which each generation of mankind is enabled to preserve the knowledge and experience of the generations before it and to begin where the last one left off instead of having to begin all over again.

It doesn’t matter whether it is written or only spoken. Indeed, before man invented the alphabet or even learned to transmit his ideas and feelings by crude, rough pictures there wasn’t any literature except what was spoken or recited. The “Iliad” and “Odyssey” of Homer were sung or recited, long before they were put down on parchment. Our fairy-stories and legends generally date back hundreds and hundreds of years and were preserved only by each generation telling them to the next. In later days, especially during the Middle Ages, many valuable poems and stories, and even more of history, would have been lost to us forever if wandering bards and minstrels had not recited or sung them and taught them to others. There is no way, except literature, by which we can learn from the past. Did you ever think that our generation has, by itself, added only a very, very tiny bit to the knowledge existing in the world when our generation was born? All our great inventions would be impossible without this previous knowledge.

Of course, literature in its stricter sense is more limited than all the material covered by the definition above. A dictionary, for example, can hardly be called literature. A bit of writing or talking to be literature must show the imprint of the author’s personality and it must have in it something valuable enough to make it worth preserving. But, in general, the definition as given gets at the root of the matter, and that is all we need be concerned with. It shows that literature is not a fad or an amusement of too highly cultivated people, but one of the biggest and most valuable things in the world. _We_, no matter who or where we are or even whether we can read or write, are dependent on literature in our everyday lives.

How can we tell good literature from bad? Well, it is often pretty hard to tell about the books and stories of today, but there is a very easy way of telling about what was written a hundred or a thousand years ago. Nowadays, when most people can read and write and the printing-press makes it possible to produce great numbers of books and papers, there are thousands of people writing all the time and naturally a lot of them write very poor stuff. We talk about the “best selling books” and go wild over some new novel. We did the same last month and we’ll do the same next month.

“What is the most popular novel this month?”

“Oh, ‘So-and-so’ by So-and-so. It’s simply grand!”

“What was the most popular novel last month?”

“Let’s see. Oh, yes—‘So-and-so,’ by So-and-so. It’s a perfectly charming story.”

“What was the most popular novel a year ago?”

“A _year_ ago? Mercy, I don’t know! There are so many novels now.”

There it is. All the time people are raving about the “latest” book. Like as not in a year they can’t even remember its name. Why is that? Because, hardly any of these books are really _good_ literature. Many of them are interesting and amuse us while we read them, but that’s all. In a year, or less, we have forgotten them.

Then what _is_ good literature? We can find out this way. Consider all the books that were written a thousand, a hundred, fifty or even twenty-five years ago. How many of them are read now? Comparatively very, very few. Now _why_? Because they weren’t good enough. There is a sure test for you—if a book lives on after its author is dead and buried you can be pretty sure that it is good literature. It had something to say that did more than amuse people for a month. The author had put into it some little bit of _human nature_, of _human life_, that is as true for people a hundred years later as it was for those who first read it. (Mind you, I am talking about novels, stories and plays, about fiction and poetry, not just about such things as histories which are generally preserved anyway because of the cold facts in them.) The authors of such novels or poems have written into them some of their own experience and observation of _life_. The characters in them are real human beings, and the feelings, thoughts, passions, sentiments, actions of the characters, or those expressed by the author without the aid of his characters, are, in general, the same feelings, thoughts, passions, sentiments and actions that you and I and our acquaintances have in us today. Therefore we understand the people in those books and sympathize with them, even though they may have lived centuries ago, in a foreign land, dressed in strange clothes, bound by strange customs and outwardly having very little in common with us. There is only one thing that people are _always_ interested in—human nature. It is according to whether a book gives us a true picture of human nature that it lives or dies, that it is good literature or bad.

With new books now appearing by thousands it is almost impossible to tell which will live and which will die, which are really good and which are not. Time is the only sure test. The men talk about Dr. Conan Doyle’s “Sherlock Holmes” stories now and some of us women like these tales equally well, but will they be alive in 1975 or not? Emile Gaboriau died only twenty-three years ago. His detective stories are better ones than Dr. Conan Doyle’s, but they are no longer read except by the few. Wilkie Collins wrote novels that made you hold your breath with interest and were widely read. He has been dead only seventeen years, yet already “The Moonstone,” “The Woman in White” and his other books are of the past. Both Gaboriau and Collins have some real merit and will probably always be read at least slightly, but what of the thousands of other authors who wrote books twenty-five years ago and whose very names are forgotten?

Among the books that have come down to us from the past we can choose pretty safely. If they have lived this long we can be sure there is something worth while in them. I know a few sensible women, some of them with both time and money, who make it a rule never to read any book until it has been published a year. If at the end of that period it is still interesting other people, then they buy it, being pretty sure that it must have at least some small merit. They say it is surprising how very few books do remain in the public attention that long.

Now I know just what will happen. Some of you know all I have been saying as well as I do, but some one is sure to say:

“Oh, yes, that’s all true enough, I suppose, but when I find time to read, I don’t want to wade through anything heavy.”

Nobody asked you to. Books aren’t “heavy” just because they are good. Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s “Marjorie Daw” and “The Story of a Bad Boy,” Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer,” “Huckleberry Finn” and “Innocents Abroad” are certainly far, far from being heavy; so are Charles Kingsley’s “Water Babies,” De Foe’s “Robinson Crusoe;” so are Dr. Brown’s “Rab, and His Friends,” Ouida’s “A Dog of Flanders,” though both bring tears to the eyes; so are the poems of Robert Burns and Longfellow; so are Æsop’s “Fables,” the stories of Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page; so are hundreds of others. Yet all these just named are good literature. If by “heavy” you mean only things that are dull or hard to understand, the list of good books that are not “heavy” grows tremendously, and there are still others that may be hard to understand in places but are nevertheless interesting enough to “amuse” you all the way through. Shakespeare, George Eliot, Hawthorne, Poe, Tennyson, Stevenson, Dickens, Thackeray, Whittier, Helen Hunt Jackson, Hugh Conway, Bret Harte, Augusta J. Evans, Louisa M. Alcott and scores besides are more than “worth while.” If there are now and then dull or difficult pages in some of them yet they are all the world away from being “heavy.”

Reading for amusement only is much better than not reading at all. We need amusement. But there is one danger. If what we read for amusement happens to be poor literature it is _not true to life_ and you are learning things about yourself and others that are not true and may lead you into mistakes some day. You know what dime novels—Wild West and detective stories—will do to young people. It isn’t only because they are exciting and deal with crime, but because they give false ideas of life and false ideals. There are thousands of books, apparently harmless enough, that will hurt grown people as much as dime novels hurt the children. There are plenty of books you can read “just for amusement” which are also very good literature and very good teachers of life. Why waste time on the poor ones?

When I say a book is good or bad I am not referring to its morals but to its merit as literature. A hopelessly poor piece of literature may have excellent morals, and a book that is good literature may be very unsafe from a moral point of view. The relation of literature to morals is too big a question for me to discuss. Each of us must steer her own course in regard to this question. It is, however, helpful to remember that if the purpose and main lesson of a book are morally good, even though it may deal a little with questionable subjects, its reading may tend toward good rather than evil.

_SHOULD WOMEN BE INTERESTED IN POLITICS?_

Next month in the April number we will take up woman’s interest in politics. Is there any reason for her being interested in them? What effect do city, state and national laws and law-makers have on her own personal welfare or that of her family? If she raises children what effect does that have on future politics? What two great questions now before the country bear directly on the price she pays for food and clothing and on the price her husband receives for what he sells or for his labor? What about the men the voting members of your family help elect to the state legislature or the national Congress or White House? (Perhaps if you live in Colorado, you vote for President yourself.) What about the wives and children of these men? What about the candidates who were not elected and their families? If there is an election on, ought you to know which of the candidates are rascals, which represent wrong principles, which will vote for measures that will make the things you buy more expensive? Ought you to use your influence against such men?

Let us each see who can send in the best reason for a woman’s being interested in politics. The answers must be very short, and they must reach our office before March 10, for the April number, as you know, appears March 25, and by March 10, at the very latest the printer should be working on whatever is to go in it. This seems like working a long ways ahead of time, but the Editor tells me that most magazines by that time, will be all done with the April number and working on May or June! So you see you will have to write very quickly to be in time.

We had a glimpse last month at some of the interesting things connected with bread and bread-making. The house is full of things we have known so long that we scarcely think of them except as parts of the daily routine, but which, if we turn our attention to them, prove veritable mines of information, history, travel and even romance. This month we’ll consider some of the things concerned in bread-making.

_Wheat_

Wheat, for example, takes us all over the earth and back to the days before there was any history at all. Wheat, like our other grains, belongs to the Grass Family and its scientific name is _Triticum vulgare_. It is the most valuable of all the cereal grasses and, next to maize, or Indian corn, the most productive. Rice is really its only rival as a human food. It is generally supposed that it originally came, like so many of our grains and fruits, from the plains of Central Asia, but it has been found that a certain wild grass of Western Asia and the Mediterranean regions, can be cultivated into what we call wheat. It is the bread-food of most European nations (who, by the way, call it corn) and is supplanting maize in America. In our country alone 40 or 50 million acres are devoted to it every year, and the yield is a million or so over half a billion bushels. Generally, one-fifth to two-fifths of this is sent to other countries. Russia, Canada and other countries produce large quantities of it.

Wheat was widely grown in the pre-historic world. As far back as there is any record of languages there was a word for wheat. We know that the Chinese (who knew about gunpowder, printing, glass, spectacles and many other things centuries before we “invented” them) cultivated wheat as far back as 2,700 B. C., and regarded it as a direct gift from heaven. The Egyptians attributed wheat to their heathen goddess Isis. The Greeks believed that Ceres, their goddess of agriculture, gave it to her favorite, Triptolemus, and lent him her miraculous chariot to drive over the earth and distribute the new grain to the sons of men. There is a pyramid in Egypt, which scientists estimate was built 3,359 years before Christ was born, more than 5,000 years ago, and in one of the bricks of this pyramid they found imbedded a little grain of wheat. How much that single grain told the world! The lake-dwellers of Switzerland and Italy also left traces showing they knew the use of wheat, as did the inhabitants of what is now Hungary, in the Stone Age.

There are more cultivated varieties of wheat than of any other grain, the number running up into the hundreds. New varieties are generally secured by taking the pollen from tiny flowers of one variety and putting it on the pistil of another, so that the resulting seeds, while they take after both parents, produce a new variety unlike either of them. This process of cross-breeding has been made to produce marvelous results not only in other grains, but in fruits, nuts, flowers and trees, as any of you who are familiar with the work of Mr. Luther Burbank, the “California Wizard,” know.

_Flour_

Flour, being generally a product of wheat, has had much the same history, but the process of milling has a little story of its own. The earliest mills consisted merely of two stones, one round, the other hollowed out. The grain was placed in the hollow and then crunched into small bits by the round stone. Later on, man thought of putting a handle on the round stone, making something like a mortar and pestle. Another and later way of improving this crude mill, was to groove the round stone and make it fit into a fairly deep hole in the under stone, with a place for the ground meal to come out. This is called a quern. You have heard of someone’s being “caught between the upper and nether mill-stones.” In Deuteronomy (XXIV, 6,) we find this: “No man shall take the upper or nether mill-stone to pledge, for he taketh a man’s life to pledge.” In Numbers (XI, 8), “ground it in mills or beat it in a mortar” shows that the children of Israel, knew both kinds of mill, and other passages show that they had at least two kinds of meal or flour.

The Romans used only the mortar and pestle, and until 173 B. C. the poor woman did all the work. Then baking became a regular occupation, and the bakers were called _pistores_, which means “pounders.” When the Romans conquered Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Holland, Belgium and Britain they took their customs with them. The hand-mill was followed by one with animal power, and later by one with water-power. As late as 1800 A. D. there were to be found in remote parts of Scotland and Ireland crude mills made of two large stones ground against each other by running or falling water.

The wheat grain is really not a seed, but a fruit, for it is composed not only of the true seed, but of the seed and its husk or covering. The two considered together, make what botanists call a “fruit.” In modern milling this husk is generally separated from the seed and made into bran, while the seed becomes flour. When the two are mixed we have “whole wheat” flour.

Good flour, should be a pure, uniform white powder, only faintly tinged with yellow, free from grits and lumps, should show some adhesiveness when pressed, should have no smell of damp and moldiness or any acidity of taste.

Most flour now, is “new process” flour, made by a gradual crushing between sets of rollers revolved by water-power, steam or electricity. The “new process” originated in Hungary and France and began to be generally adopted about 1880.

_Yeast_

Yeast is a vegetable. Strange as it may seem, yeast is a tiny fungus growth, though it takes a microscope to see it. In brewing (particularly with hops), in wine-making and in any other process of fermentation where the liquid contains some sugar and some albuminous matter, the clear liquid becomes “muddy.” Then the minute things that made it muddy collect into a foaming, bitter mass which is yeast. This yeast has the power of setting up fresh fermentation when put with other things. It is fermentation that makes bread-dough “raise.” Oh, yes, there is alcohol in bread-dough, but it doesn’t stay there. As I told you last month, 12,000,000 gallons of alcohol are made and lost in bread-making every year in Germany alone! Some day scientists will learn how to save it.

_Hops_

We generally think of hops when yeast is mentioned. I wish any of you who can tell us the story of hops would send it in to our Department.

_Salt_

How could we cook, or eat, or live without salt? It is an absolute necessity for people and animals. Also, it is very valuable as a fertilizer, and was used as such centuries and centuries ago by the Hindoos and Chinese. Further than this, soda is derived from salt, and as soda is necessary in making both glass and soap, these two useful things could not be made if it were not for salt. Most of our modern textile fabrics are more or less dependent on chlorine, which is made from salt. We all know how valuable salt is as a preservative for butter, meats and other animal food, and now they are learning a way to preserve timber with it. We know, too, its use in freezing ice cream, but may not realize how much it is used for refrigerating other things. In short, even if we could live at all without it, life would be pretty miserable.

The chemists call salt _chloride of sodium_ and use this symbol for it—Na Cl, which shows what it is composed of, but doesn’t mean anything to me.

We get salt in three ways—from rock-salt mines, from natural brine springs and from evaporating sea water. The world’s biggest rock-salt mines are in Gallicia, upper Austria, Bavaria, Hungary, Transylvania, Wallachia; at Vic and Dienze, France; at Bix, Switzerland; at Cadrona, Spain, and at Cheshire, England. That at Wieliczka in Gallicia is a mile long, three-fourths of a mile wide and over a thousand feet deep. Some of its chambers are 150 feet high—as high as a sky-scraper—and one of them is fitted up as a chapel to St. Anthony, the altar, statues and everything being solid salt. In this mine is a lake 650 feet long and 40 feet deep. There are horses there that have never seen the light of day, and men, women and children who live in salt houses and never see the outside world above their heads. It is a small village buried down under the ground. When the emperor and his family visit the mine, it is brilliantly illuminated and a grand festival is held in a great hall.

In Africa are large beds of salt land, beds of rock-salt and a lake covered at times with a shining white crust of pure salt two feet thick. France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and some Mediterranean islands are the chief producers of sea-salt. In China there are salt wells of great depth and number.

In Spain, France and other countries salt is a government monopoly, and no one else can sell it. Travelers tell me they have seen salt lakes in Spain where the people living along the shores were prevented by the _guardia civile_, or national police, from picking up the salt deposited in large quantities at the water’s edge. They had to buy it of the government. The poor use salt sparingly over there even now, and you may remember that the heavy tax on salt was one cause of the awful French Revolution.

In our country nearly every state has salt deposits of some kind. Virginia furnishes lots of rock-salt. The most important salt springs are in Onondaga County, New York, and furnish nearly half of what the country uses. The state owns them and gets a royalty of one cent a bushel. Michigan produces about twenty million bushels a year.

_Removing Grease Spots_

To remove a grease-spot from cloth, lay a piece of clean blotting paper over the spot and then pass a hot iron back and forth over blotter. As the grease is melted and soaked into the blotter, cover the stain with a fresh part of the blotter and continue the operation until the stain has disappeared.

_Dish-Mop_

The little dish-washing mop is a comparatively recent invention, but its use is increasing as its advantages are learned by experience. It is merely a handle about ten inches long with a miniature mop, smaller than your clenched fist, at the end. With very little trouble a home-made one can be arranged, which is practically as good as the store ones, though the latter can be bought for ten or fifteen cents. The little mop saves the hand from going into the water so much, answers every purpose of the old dish-rag, and can, like the cloth, be cleaned by vigorous boiling.

_Spice Cabinets_

The little tin or wooden cabinets, now on sale in large quantities at the bigger stores, with from four to twelve small drawers for spices, are great space-savers and time-savers. The only objection is that, despite the label on each drawer, the busy cook is sometimes likely to get hold of the wrong one.

_Soup-Stock_

If soup-stock is put to cool in an earthware vessel, instead of a metal one, much better results are obtained. It is claimed that this is one of the secrets of the excellent soups the French are famous for.

_A Fuel Saver_

If one uses a gas stove, a single burner can be made to do several times its ordinary work by means of a thin sheet of iron, about a foot square, placed directly over it. The flame spreads out against this sheet and renders its whole area available for cooking, so that two, three or even four small vessels can get from this one burner enough heat to boil water, or at least to keep the contents warm against the time for serving. No more gas is used than when a single vessel is allotted to each burner. It is possible to buy a sheet of iron, an eighth or a quarter of an inch thick, made expressly for this purpose, the edges being turned down to raise it about half an inch from the surface of the stove.

_Table Mats_

Asbestos, bought in large pieces, cut into round, oval or square mats, and either covered daintily or placed under regular table-mats, makes not only an economical protection for a polished table against hot dishes, but a very sure one.

_Coal Oil and Gasoline_

If you are in the habit of starting a fire by pouring coal-oil on the kindling, break yourself of it. You may do it safely fifteen hundred times and be blown up the next. Coal-oil will not even burn if you drop a match in a barrel of it, but if you spread it out in any way (as on a lamp-wick) it will not only burn but the gas thus formed will often explode with terrific force. Never fill a coal-oil lamp while it is burning.

Gasoline is still more dangerous. If the fire insurance inspector finds out that you keep even a small bottle of it in the house, he will have your policy cancelled immediately, unless you have paid extra for a special clause permitting you to keep a small amount on the premises. I knew a physician who was killed and blown clear across the street by the explosion of gasoline in a saucer, which was being used for cleaning spots on the carpet of a house he was visiting. The vapor caught fire from an open grate two rooms away from where the saucer had been left. Gasoline is an excellent cleaner, but if you use it, do so out of doors. Let no one come near with a lighted match or cigar, and throw away any of the liquid that may be left. As an explosive, gasoline is much more powerful than gunpowder.

_A Cheap Shower Bath_

Five feet of rubber tubing and a ten-cent spray will make as good a shower-bath apparatus for the bath-tub as any one could ask. The stem of the spray will twist into one end of the tubing and if the bath-tub faucet has the right kind of attachment it will twist into the other end, making a long flexible shower-spray that will prove an unending comfort. If the faucet hasn’t the right kind of nozzle to fit a hose, one can be purchased from the plumber or hardware store for very little. Besides the pleasure and comfort a spray gives, there is the added satisfaction of thoroughly cleaning the body with perfectly clean water before drying with the towel.

_A Warmer Bed_

If you continue to feel cold in bed even after piling on a mountain of covers, turn your attention underneath. A feather-bed lets no cold reach you from below, and a box-mattress is often nearly as good a protection, but an ordinary mattress, even a good one, is very likely to let the cold through. If you don’t use a comforter under the sheet, for the sake of the mattress and for greater softness to the body, put one there for warmth. If this is not enough, spread several layers of newspaper or wrapping paper between this comfort and the mattress. It will crackle under your weight for a time, but it will keep you warm and cosy.

_Hanging Pictures_

If you are hanging a picture from a nail in the wall instead of from the picture-molding, you can save the wall by using a very small, thin wire nail. If it is driven in without “wobbling” and downward at a narrow angle with the wall a small nail will hold a surprisingly large picture.

_Save your Eyes_

Do not sleep with a strong light shining into your eyes. In sleep the eyes are relaxed and, closed though they are, suffer from too strong a light. The sun shining into them before you wake in the morning is especially bad. Never read or put the eyes to a strain before breakfast.

_To Reduce Weight_

A physician gives the following foods as a broad and common-sense diet for those wishing to reduce their flesh: lean mutton and beef, veal and lamb, soups not thickened, beef-tea and broth, poultry, game, fish and eggs, bread in moderation, greens, cresses, lettuce, etc., green peas, cabbage, cauliflower, onions, fresh fruit without sugar.

_Peeling Onions_

It is said that if when peeling onions one holds a needle or any small piece of polished steel between the teeth, the steel will attract the acid fumes of the onion and save the eyes.

_To Keep Lemons_

1. Cover with buttermilk or sour milk and change once a week. This will also freshen dry lemons.

2. Put in clean white cask or jar, cover with cold water, change every other day and keep in a cool place. This method will keep lemons fresh for months.

_To Clean Knives_

Many are unfamiliar with this old-time method: Take even portions of fine coal ashes and soda, mix with a little water, rub the knives briskly with the preparation, wash in tepid water without soap, and wipe dry.

_Floor Polish_

One quart turpentine, six ounces yellow beeswax, four ounces white resin. Melt the beeswax and resin together over a _slow_ fire and when partly cool add the turpentine. Bottle for use.

_A PRIZE FOR THE BEST TRUE STORY._

_Every month the Department will publish a little story of heroism in the home—not any one act of heroism, but the tale of how some one lived heroically, lived self-sacrifice, in everyday life. It must be true and must be about somebody you know or have known or know definitely about. It must not have over 500 words. The shorter, the better. Whoever sends in the best story each month will not only have it printed but will receive a year’s subscription to WATSON’S MAGAZINE sent to any name you choose. Tell your story simply and plainly._

The Wickedness of Worry

“Worry is one of the worst curses of modern life. I say of modern life, not because people a thousand years ago did not worry, because as civilization advances men become more highly strung, more sensitive, and less capable of detachment. Thus, we often say, in a very expressive phrase, that a thing ‘gets upon our nerves.’ Something distressing happens to us, and we cannot shake it off. Some one treats us rudely, harshly, or unkindly, and the word or deed rankles in our minds. We think it over until it is magnified into a grievous and intentional insult. We take it to bed with us, and no sooner is the light put out than we begin to recall it, and turn over in our minds all the circumstances that occasioned it. We sleep feverishly, haunted all the time with the sense of something disagreeable. We wake, and the accursed thing is still rankling in our minds. This is one form of worry, which is very common among people of sensitive minds.

Another form of worry is the tendency to brood over past errors. The business man, or the public man, is suddenly overwhelmed with the conviction that he has made an awful mess of things. The worst of all calamities is the lack of energy to grapple with calamity, and in most cases it is worry that breaks down a man’s energy.

A third, and perhaps a more common form of worry, is the gloomy anticipation of future calamities. There are some men who, however happy they may be today, are perpetually frightening themselves with the possibilities of a disastrous tomorrow. They live in terror. When actual sorrow comes upon us, most of us discover unexpected resources of fortitude in ourselves. But nothing sickens the heart so much as imagined sorrow. Of this form of worry we may well say, “It’s wicked!”

I have no doubt that most of my readers know by experience what some of these things mean. No doubt also many of them have many real causes for anxious thought, and they will ask me how I propose to deal with it. One of the best ways is to be content to live a day at a time. Sydney Smith counsels us with rich wisdom to take short views of life. Each day is an entity in itself. It is rounded off by the gulf of sleep; it has its own hours which will never return; it stands separate, with its own opportunities and pleasures. Make the most of them.

Another good and simple rule is never to take our griefs to bed with us. ‘Easy to say, but how difficult to do,’ will be replied. But it is largely a matter of will and habit.

John Wesley once said that he would as soon steal as worry, for each was equally a sin. To worry is wasteful and foolish; we have also to recollect that it is wicked.”—_W. J. Dawson._

_Lemon Pie (Old)_

Two lemons, five eggs, two teaspoonsful of melted butter, eight large spoonsful of white sugar. Squeeze the juice of both lemons and grate the rind of one. Stir together the yolks of three eggs and the white of one, with the sugar, juice and rind, beat well, add one coffee-cup of cream and beat well for a few minutes longer. Pour the mixture into the waiting crust dough. Bake until pastry is done. Meanwhile beat the remaining whites of eggs to a stiff froth and stir in four spoonsful of white sugar. Spread on top and brown slightly. This is enough for two pies.

_Simple Pudding_

(No eggs or milk needed) Slice some good bread rather thick, cutting away the crust. Butter on both sides, lay in a deep dish and fill it up with molasses after seasoning with ginger, cinnamon or lemon.

_Irish Potato Pie (Old)_

Two good pints of potatoes after they are boiled and mashed. Put through a sieve while warm. Add small cup of butter, milk enough to make a batter. Cinnamon, lemon, spices and sugar to taste. Four eggs beaten separately, stirring in the whites after the yokes. This is enough for four pies.

_BY Thomas E. Watson._]

=The Social Secretary.= By David Graham Phillips. The
Bobbs-Merrill Co., Indianapolis.

An exceedingly clever novel, dealing chiefly with the effort of a Congressional family to break into good society in Washington, D. C. The Congressman is a Western man with a lot of money, and with a wife who has lots of horse sense and a sound heart.

They need a pilot to steer them into the realms of fashion and influence. To this position comes a beautiful, spirited and accomplished girl who belongs to a well-known family which is eminently respectable but is in reduced circumstances.

The campaign mapped out by the Social Secretary in behalf of the Congressional family is finally crowned with success, and the heroine marries the son of the Congressman, as a natural, logical result.

In the course of the campaign, the author gives us many an enlightening glimpse of what goes on in Washington “behind the scenes.” This little item for instance: When President Roosevelt is called away from the dinner-table by some urgent matter which requires instant attention, Mrs. Roosevelt, all the ladies, and all the gentlemen rise as the President rises and remain standing until he returns.

I, for one, was quite surprised to know that our sturdy lion-hunter, bronco-busting President had fallen into snobbery of that description. I hope it isn’t so.

=A Maker of History.= By E. Phillips Oppenheim. Little, Brown &
Co., Boston, Mass.

A book which catches hold of you and takes you right along. It is original in its plot, dramatic in its incidents, absorbingly interesting in its narrative.

A young Englishman, by accident, happens to witness a meeting between the Emperor of Germany and the Czar of Russia—a meeting which elaborate precautions had been taken to keep secret. Another accident puts into the possession of the young Englishman a page of the secret treaty between the two Emperors. The scheme of this treaty is that Russia shall give England a _casus belli_, that Germany shall come to the assistance of Russia, and that Great Britain shall be despoiled. The young Englishman is suspected, and his footsteps are dogged by German spies. Later he talks imprudently in a Parisian restaurant, and becomes an object of intense interest to the French Secret Service. He suddenly and mysteriously disappears. His sister arrives in Paris, is astonished at the disappearance of her brother, and starts out to search for him. Then the sister disappears.

After a time everything turns out happily for hero and heroine, but in the meanwhile many an event of thrilling interest happens to keep the reader wide awake and wondering what the outcome will be.

=The Greatest Trust in the World.= By Charles Edward Russell.
The Ridgway-Thayer Company, New York City.