For many years conscientious teachers tried to drive us to household work by calling it our duty: a dull name, sternly forbidding us to find pleasure or interest therein. It was a moral dose of physic, salutary but disagreeable. In the same way we were taught to make shirts and mend stockings, but an evening dress was held to be frivolity. Taste was discouraged, and beauty driven out of our work; no wonder, then, that the young and careless shunned it altogether, and threw as much of it as they could into the hands of hirelings. Is there no way of teaching duty without making it repulsive by its dreariness and ugliness? Now that we pride ourselves upon being no longer weak-minded and silly, let us exert ourselves to act upon Lord Bacon's maxim, "Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable." We need not fear that the routine of daily handiwork--which will become interesting to us as we try to make it agreeable--will interfere with our further intellectual culture. And even should it do so, are not our leaders of thought beginning to perceive that manual labour is more commercially valuable than mental labour; that the demand for the former is greater as the supply becomes perceptibly less? The deadness of machine work causes us to prize the spirited and varied touch that can only be imparted by the hand. Every woman, among her acquaintance, knows some one who is a skilful, energetic manager of her house, and yet whose reading and accomplishments are above the average. Indeed, as I heard one of my friends of this stamp say, when asked how she found time for so much sketching from nature, "One always finds time for what one likes to do." We see what priceless possessions we lose by our misuse of time, or waste of it in inanities, when we look at the embroideries and other work of our ancestresses, and compare these with the poor results of our months and years. We see splendid embroideries of the time of Titian, with the needlework still strong enough to outlast all our nonsense in "leviathan stitch" and "railroad stitch;" and old lace, by the side of which our work of mingling woven braids and crochet in such a manner as to get most show for the least cost of taste, labour, and invention, is worth nothing at all. With regard to my second question--Must we keep many servants to wait upon each other?--I will here make one observation. The heaviest part of the work of a cook and kitchen-maid consists in preparing the kitchen meals. Six servants require as many potatoes peeled, and as many plates, knives, forks, etc., cleaned, as six ladies and gentlemen. Multiply their five meals a day by six, and you will find that there are thirty plates, knives, forks spoons, cups or glasses, and many other things, to be laid on the table, used, washed, and put away again, at a computation of only one plate to each meal. Think of the time alone consumed in this, and the breakage; and this merely in the meals.