Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 20, No. 33, November 1877Various
Science
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 20, No. 33, November 1877
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
watch, one for your comb, one for lamplighters, one for burnt matches;
ever so many others for what you can't guess; and all beaded, bugled,
tasselled and embroidered to form a perfect zodiac of splendors.
Though the country wife is kind to her domestics, she has a knack of
getting the best out of them. The girl who scorches things and boils tea
as if some incantation of double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and
teapot bubble, had got into her head--the girl who stands like a
Stoughton bottle and bawls "Ma'am!" whenever she is spoken to--the slow
girl who can't tell time, forgets to put on the teakettle, and never
gets beyond "one I, one--two I, two," on the kitchen clock--the small
servant with the bad cold who _will_ sit by the parlor fire coughing,
snuffing and breathing hard--the girl like an overgrown man who slobbers
dish-water on the floor and steps in it--the Deutsche girl who spoils
the parlor clock turning it upside down to dust it thoroughly,--these
and worse become reliable people under the sway of the old-fashioned
country housewife. The Deutsche girl becomes a paragon in the farmhouse,
quickly falling into Yankee ways and picking up Yankee kitchen phrases,
and turning them with a bold originality. "Them clothes is bone dry,"
says the Deutsche girl. "Oh land! yes: they got a bone drying to-day. I
gave them clothes a bone rubbing and a bone boiling, and to-morrow
they'll get a bone ironing, you bet," says she. Next to her rank the
Dane and the Swede. The Irish girl is never a congenial inmate of the
farmhouse. The Irish girl is too noisy and too much given to lying. The
last might be endured--the farmer's wife would rather hear an Irish girl
tell forty lies than sing one song--but the noise she makes talking to
the butcher's boy, the peddler, the essence-man and the ash-gatherer is
insufferable; and when the Irish rag-merchant bursts open the kitchen
door roaring, "God bless you! you're a real lady; got any rags? don't
sell to them theivin' Jews, they're villains; sold your rags to a man
that pays more than me? divil a man in the county pays more than me,"
why, the farmhouse quiet is torn to ribbons. And then the Irish girl is
cross to visitors, who form the solace and charm of country life. "I
wants no lady-visitors around me; they makes too much bodderin' wid
towels and wather; they're always a-washin' of theirselves. They wants a
clean towel to every one of their tin fingers: they're afraid us gurrels
sha'n't earn our wages. Give me men for my money: they ain't always
a-cleanin' of theirselves," growls the Irish girl.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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