OUR SECOND GIRL 449 A SCHOLAR'S ADVENTURES IN THE COUNTRY 473 TRIALS OF A HOUSEKEEPER 487 The frontispiece is from a photograph of Mrs. Stowe taken in 1884. The vignette of Mrs. Stowe's later Hartford home is from a drawing by Charles Copeland. INTRODUCTORY NOTE Mrs. Stowe had early and very practical acquaintance with the art of housekeeping. It strikes one at first as a little incongruous that an author who devoted her great powers to stirring the conscience of a nation should from time to time, and at one period especially, give her mind to the ordering of family life, but a moment's consideration will show that the same woman was earnestly at the bottom of each effort. In a letter to the late Lord Denman, written in 1853, Mrs. Stowe, speaking of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, said: "I wrote what I did because, as a woman, as a mother, I was oppressed and heartbroken with the sorrows and injustice which I saw, and because, as a Christian, I felt the dishonor to Christianity." Not under the stress of passionate emotion, yet largely from a sense of real responsibility as a woman, a mother, and a Christian, she occupied herself with those concerns of every-day life which so distinctly appeal to a woman's mind. How to order a household, how to administer that little kingdom over which a woman rules, and, above all, how to make family life stable, pure, and conservative of the highest happiness, these were the questions which she asked herself constantly, and which she tried to solve, not only incidentally in her fiction, but directly in her essays, and in that field of one tenth fiction and nine tenths didacticism, which constitutes most of the present volume. _A Scholar's Adventures in the Country_ and _Trials of a Housekeeper_ appeared in the miscellany to which she gave the name of _The Mayflower_, and reflect humorously the Cincinnati experiences which again are playfully recounted in letters published in her son's _Life_. The former, contributed in 1850 to _The National Era_, was drawn pretty closely from the experiments of Professor Stowe. It is noticeable that in this paper and in _Our Second Girl_, which was contributed to _The Atlantic Monthly_ for January, 1868, the author poses as the masculine member of the household, as if this assumption gave her some advantage in the point of view. At any rate, she adopted the same role when she came more deliberately to survey a wide field in a series of articles.