there that understands how to live? who that possesses a domestic machinery so perfectly balanced, so nicely adjusted, so exquisitely oiled and polished, that every duty and every pleasure glide from it noiseless and complete as do the separate marvels that fall from the crafty wheels and lathes of this modern era?
The Old-Fashioned Housekeeper.
That the art of living, so far as the body and its surroundings are concerned, can be, and often is, carried to a very high degree of perfection, the superlative housekeepers we all have known are ample proof. My whole girlhood was spent just across the street from the greatest genius in this respect that I have ever met. The fresh exterior of her square white dwelling, with its immaculate board walk crossing her greenest sward; and its shining windows, through which smiled her roses and carnations upon the passer-by, gave pleasant promise of the absolute spotlessness of everything within. She was not one of that dismal type of housekeepers who exclude the light and muffle everything into shapelessness lest damask and carpets should fade; but on the contrary, her house was flooded with the brightest sunshine. The air, laden with the perfume of cut flowers or house-plants, seemed purer than that outside, and, whatever the weather, its temperature was perfect. Nothing was for show, and but little for pure ornament, but everything was the best of its kind and in true taste and keeping. As for her table, "never, till life and memory perish, can I forget" the vision of that teacloth, far whiter than the snow, with its gleaming silver and glass and china, displaying incomparable viands, whose delicacy and perfection were all her own.
At this ambrosial board she sat, a lady between sixty and seventy, straight as an arrow, wearing no cap, nor needing any; with her beautiful chestnut hair braided in almost as thick a tress as a quarter of a century ago; low-voiced, intelligent, self-contained; with a comprehension in her
