Household Papers and StoriesStowe, Harriet Beecher
General
Household Papers and Stories
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Didactic fiction; Home economics -- Fiction; Short stories
Young people who cannot expect by any reasonable possibility to keep
more than two or three servants, if they happen to have the means in
the outset furnish a house with just such articles as in England would
suit an establishment of sixteen. We have seen houses in England
having two or three housemaids, and tables served by a butler and two
waiters, where the furniture, carpets, china, crystal, and silver were
in one and the same style with some establishments in America where
the family was hard pressed to keep three Irish servants.
This want of servants is the one thing that must modify everything in
American life; it is, and will long continue to be, a leading feature
in the life of a country so rich in openings for man and woman that
domestic service can be only the stepping-stone to something higher.
Nevertheless we Americans are great travelers; we are sensitive,
appreciative, fond of novelty, apt to receive and incorporate into our
own life what seems fair and graceful in that of other people. Our
women's wardrobes are made elaborate with the thousand elegancies of
French toilet,--our houses filled with a thousand knick-knacks of
which our plain ancestors never dreamed. Cleopatra did not set sail on
the Nile in more state and beauty than that in which our young
American bride is often ushered into her new home,--her wardrobe all
gossamer lace and quaint frill and crimp and embroidery, her house a
museum of elegant and costly gewgaws, and, amid the whole collection
of elegancies and fragilities, she, perhaps, the frailest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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