American Woman's Home: Or, Principles of Domestic Science;: Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian HomesStowe, Harriet Beecher
Religion
American Woman's Home: Or, Principles of Domestic Science;: Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian Homes
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Home economics
In pursuing this amusement children can also be led to acquire many
useful habits. Early rising would, in many cases, be thus secured; and
if they were required to keep their walks and borders free from weeds
and rubbish, habits of order and neatness would be induced. Benevolent
and social feelings could also be cultivated, by influencing children
to share their fruits and flowers with friends and neighbors, as well
as to distribute roots and seeds to those who have not the means of
procuring them. A woman or a child, by giving seeds or slips or roots
to a washerwoman, or a farmer's boy, thus inciting them to love and
cultivate fruits and flowers, awakens a new and refining source of
enjoyment in minds which have few resources more elevated than mere
physical enjoyments. Our Saviour directs us in making feasts, to call,
not the rich who can recompense again, but the poor who can make no
returns. So children should be taught to dispense their little treasures
not alone to companions and friends, who will probably return similar
favors; but to those who have no means of making any return. If the
rich, who acquire a love for the enjoyments of taste and have the means
to gratify it, would aim to extend among the poor the cheap and simple
enjoyment of fruits and flowers, our country would soon literally
"blossom as the rose."
If the ladies of a neighborhood would unite small contributions, and
send a list of flower-seeds and roots to some respectable and honest
florist, who would not be likely to turn them off with trash, they
could divide these among themselves and their poor neighbors, so as
to secure an abundant variety at a very small expense. A bag of
flower-seeds, which can be obtained at wholesale for four cents, would
abundantly supply a whole neighborhood; and by the gathering of seeds
in the autumn, could be perpetuated.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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