HOUSEKEEPER VS. HOME-MAKER.
MONEY can buy a housekeeper, says Mrs. H. W. Beecher, in the Thrice-a-Week World, but love alone can insure a home-maker. A good boarding-house or a hotel may supply every comfort that a housekeeper can give, but a good wife and mother will insure a home. Unite the housekeeper and the home-maker, make the twain one, and that union will provide such a refuge from all outside troubles as can be found nowhere else, and just such a refuge as God designed home to be. If our daughters are, from their earliest years, led step by step through all the branches of domestic economy, beginning at the first and simplest, in accordance with their age, they will, year by year, find real pleasure in such duties, and in the progress they can not but see that they are making. And when they reach matured age, they are the ones who will make happy homes. This thought should be almost an inspiration to mothers who watch over and pray for guidance as they try to lead their daughters correctly from infancy to womanhood. It will not take many lessons in such small duties as you can teach a little girl to do easily before she will be fully equal to trying to go a step higher. Be sure, however, after the lesson has been repeated, that it is perfectly learned. Accept no work that is only half done, or carelessly done. That would be injustice to the child. But by all means be a patient, cheerful, smiling instructor. I very clearly remember how a certain little girl was taught to sew. The first lessons were commenced when she was but little over two years old. Threading the needle was the first step, and, seated on her mother's knee, it was, as people often say, “as good as a play” to see the little one try to hold the needle properly and pass the thread through the eye. Both mother and child laughed at the mistakes, and made the little one's efforts so like play that she had no thought of being impatient. When at last the needle was threaded, she was so elated that she wanted to try again. But the mother judiciously sent her out to play for a while, and then the next effort was more easily accomplished. Then came taking the first stitch. A little square of pink and white calico was basted together, and, again seated in her mother's lap, she was taught to take up just as many threads of the white as of the pink, and sew them together. There were only a few stitches at one sitting, but they must be perfect or taken out. So it was several days before the one little square was finished. The second was more quickly made, and, courage growing with success, the little girl undertook to make the whole of a doll's bedspread. Every stitch had to be perfect. The doll's spread grew into a bedspread for her own use before she was four years old, and under it her own children have often slumbered. When the spread was finished the little girl became ambitious to make her father a shirt, “all my own self.” The shirt, every stitch the work of her own hands, and well made, was a Christmas gift to her father a short time before she was five years old.