How would it simplify the burdens of the American housekeeper to have washing and ironing day expunged from her calendar! How much more neatly and compactly could the whole domestic system be arranged! If all the money that each separate family spends on the outfit and accommodations for washing and ironing, on fuel, soap, starch, and the other et ceteras, were united in a fund to create a laundry for every dozen families, one or two good women could do in first rate style what now is very indifferently done by the disturbance and disarrangement of all other domestic processes in these families. Whoever sets neighborhood laundries on foot will do much to solve the American housekeeper’s hardest problem. Finally, American women must not try with three servants to carry on life in the style which in the Old World requires sixteen,—they must thoroughly understand, and be prepared _to teach_, every branch of housekeeping,—they must study to make domestic service desirable, by treating their servants in a way to lead them to respect themselves and to feel themselves respected,—and there will gradually be evolved from the present confusion a solution of the domestic problem which shall be adapted to the life of a new and growing world. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ X. COOKERY. MY wife and I were sitting at the open bow-window of my study, watching the tuft of bright red leaves on our favorite maple, which warned us that summer was over. I was solacing myself, like all the world in our days, with reading the “Schönberg Cotta Family,” when my wife made her voice heard through the enchanted distance, and dispersed the pretty vision of German cottage-life. “Chris!” “Well, my dear.” “Do you know the day of the month?” Now my wife knows this is a thing that I never do know, that I can’t know, and, in fact, that there is no need I should trouble myself about, since she always knows, and what is more, always tells me. In fact, the question, when asked by her, meant more than met the ear. It was a delicate way of admonishing me that another paper for the “Atlantic” ought to be in train; and so I answered, not to the external form, but to the internal intention. “Well, you see, my dear, I haven’t made up my mind what my next paper shall be about.” “Suppose, then, you let me give you a subject.” “Sovereign lady, speak on! Your slave hears!”