COTTAGE IDEAS. Passing by the kitchen door, I heard Louisa, the maid, chanting to a child on her knee: Feyther stole th' Paason's sheep; A merry Christmas we shall keep; We shall have both mutton and beef-- _But we won't say nothing about it_. To rightly understand this rhyme you must sing it with long-drawn emphasis on each word, lengthening it into at least two syllables; the first a sort of hexameter, the second a pentameter of sound: Fey-ther sto-ole th' Paa-son's sheep. The last line is to come off more trippingly, like an 'aside.' This old sing-song had doubtless been handed down from the times when the labourers really did steal sheep, a crime happily extinct with cheap bread. Louisa was one of the rare old sort--hard-working, and always ready; never complaining, but satisfied with any food there chanced to be; sensible and sturdy; a woman who could be thoroughly depended on. Her boxes were full of good dresses, of a solid, unassuming kind, such as would wear well--a perfect wardrobe. Her purse was always well supplied with money; she had money saved up, and she sent money to her parents: yet her wages, until late years, had been small. In doing her duty to others she did good to herself. A duchess would have been glad to have her in her household. She had been in farmhouse service from girlhood, and had doubtless learned much from good housewives; farmers' wives are the best of all teachers: and the girls, for their own sakes, had much better be under them than wasting so much time learning useless knowledge at compulsory schools. Freckles said, when he came in, He never would enter a tawny skin, was another of her rhymes. Freckles come in with summer, but never appear on a dark skin, so that the freckled should rejoice in these signs of fairness. Your father, the elderberry, Was not such a gooseberry As to send in his bilberry Before it was dewberry. Some children are liable to an unpleasant complaint at night; for this there is a certain remedy. A mouse is baked in the oven to a 'scrump,' then pounded to powder, and this powder administered. Many ladies still have faith in this curious medicine; it reminds one of the powdered mummy, once the great cure of human ills. Country places have not always got romantic names--Wapse's Farm, for instance, and Hog's Pudding Farm. Wapse is the provincial for wasp.