In the following chapters I propose to give young housekeepers, just launching their bark on the troubled seas of domesticity, the benefit of the experience that has been bought by me, occasionally rather dearly, in the course of some eighteen or twenty years; for I have often been struck with amazement at discovering how few really practical guides there are that even profess to help newly married girls past those first shoals and quicksands that so often wreck the little vessel, or that spoil and waste so much that could have been usefully employed had knowledge stood at the helm, and experience served as a lighthouse to point out the rocks and narrows. Naturally, no one ever uses another’s experience entirely: to do so would make life too near perfection and too monotonous to be pleasant. Still, there are a hundred little hints that I have constantly been asked to give, a great many helps to household arrangement that I have bestowed on many of my young friends starting in life; and I trust I may not be considered unduly egotistical if I lay before my readers the result of some years of life, and a good deal of experience obtained by looking about me generally. I shall propose in the first two or three chapters to sketch out some ‘notions,’ as our American cousins would say, about the questions of house-choosing and house-furnishing, I shall then pass on to the question of servants; then babies will have their turn; education, more especially of girls, will not be forgotten; and I shall endeavour to do my utmost to state plainly and describe accurately, not only how a house should be furnished, but how it should be managed and kept going, literally from garret to basement.