A Little Housekeeping Book for a Little Girl; Or, Margaret's Saturday MorningsBenton, Caroline French
General
A Little Housekeeping Book for a Little Girl; Or, Margaret's Saturday Mornings
Benton, Caroline French
Home economics -- Juvenile literature
She brushed up the crumbs, aired the room, and put it in order. She
arranged the doilies on the table, one under each plate, with a round of
felt under that, laid the silver, put on her mother's tray with the cups
and saucers, set the tumblers and napkins around, and the plates with
the finger-bowls and fruit-knives, and the bread and butter plates with
the spreaders. She filled the salts freshly, and last of all put on a
vase of flowers. Then she took the cereal dishes, platter, and plates
out to heat in the oven.
She found her mother was getting ready the eggs and other things for
breakfast, and she need not help, so she carried into the dining-room
the butter balls and put them around; filled the finger-bowls and
tumblers with cold water and the coffee-cups with hot; arranged the
fruit on the sideboard, and put cream into the pitcher on the tray as
well as in another pitcher for the cereal. By the time breakfast was
ready she had on her white apron and had washed her hands, and when the
family came down she was ready to show them all what a well-trained
waitress she was.
"Do sit down with us," her father begged. "You have done so much
already!" But Margaret felt a little proud that she knew her waiting
lesson so well, and said she would rather not. She really enjoyed moving
very quietly around the table, bringing in and taking out things,
passing everything to the left, and laying down plates at the right, and
generally remembering just what she had been taught.
After all had finished she ate her own breakfast, and found she had been
up so long and worked so much that it tasted twice as good as usual.
When she had finished she put on her gingham apron again and cleared the
table. She took up the crumbs carefully and used the carpet-sweeper all
over the rug. She scraped and piled the dishes in nice, neat piles, and,
drawing the hot water, she washed and wiped them all nicely, and put
them away. She swept the kitchen, wiped off the tables, shut up the
range and washed out the dish-towels exactly as her grandmother had
taught in the lesson she gave on the kitchen. Then she went up-stairs.
Her grandmother, mother, and aunts had been afraid she would get too
tired with such a long day's work as she had planned to do, and they had
made their own beds, but they left Margaret's room for her for fear she
would be disappointed. She closed the windows first, and while the room
warmed she made the bathroom neat, washed and wiped out the tub and
scrubbed off the wash-stand.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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