Though the life of that tragic muse Mrs. Siddons was girded about with observance and worship from the highest in the land, though her mind and imagination were always employed in realizing the most glorious creations of the most glorious poets, Mrs. Siddons in her home was at once the simplest and the tenderest of women. She did a great deal of the household work herself, and her grand friends, when they called, would be met by her with a flat-iron in her hand, or would find her seated studying a new part, while, at the same time, she rocked the cradle of her latest born, and knitted her husband's stockings. When she went to the theatre she was generally accompanied by one or more of her children, and the little things would cling about her, holding her hand or her dress, as she stood in the side scenes. The fine ladies who petted her could not put one grain of their fine-ladyism into her. To the end of her life she remained a proof of the not-generally-believed fact that an artist can be, at the same time, a most purely domestic woman. The same too may be said of a mathematician, for the greatest woman-mathematician of any age, Mary Somerville, was renowned for her good housekeeping. An American newspaper lately addressed the following wise words to young women: "Learn to keep house. If you would be a level-headed woman; if you would have right instincts and profound views, and that most subtle, graceful, and irresistible of all things, womanly charm; if you would make your pen, your music, your accomplishments tell, and would give them body, character, and life; if you would be a woman of genuine power, and queen o'er all the earth, learn to keep house thoroughly and practically. You see the world all awry, and are consumed with a desire to set it right. Must you go on a mission to the heathen? Very well, but learn to keep house first. Begin reform, where all true reform must begin, at the centre and work outwards; at the foundation and work upwards. What is the basis and centre of all earthly life? It is the family, the home; these relations dictate and control all others. _There is nothing from which this distracted world is suffering so much to-day, as for want of thorough housekeeping and homemaking._"