We escape much of the hard work our mothers and grandmothers performed so energetically, and about which housekeepers of the present day hear so many disparaging comparisons; for machinery does better and far more expeditiously many things that in olden times could only be accomplished by hard labor. The wool is no longer carded by hand. Our factories have banished the spinning-wheel from the good old kitchen fireside; the little ones nestle no longer by mother’s knee, watching with never-ceasing wonder and enjoyment the “head” of flax disappear from the distaff and become a smooth, bright thread, under the skillful hand and foot that keep the pretty wheel so active. The cool breeze, laden with the perfume of cinnamon-roses and lilacs, while it sweeps through the open window of the old attic, no longer sports with golden curls, as the children run merry races in their efforts to “keep step” when the long white rolls of wool in the hand of the mother are transformed by the rapid revolutions of the big wheel into yarn for knitting. Little hands no longer wind it, from the spindle on the swifts, into skeins, or fill the bobbins for the weaver’s shuttle, and no bright eyes watch it as it flies through the warp. The mothers escape the labor of the loom, while the little folks lose all this, or the still greater sport of meddling with the web, in their vain efforts to throw the shuttle through, or to _bang up_ if they succeed,--the frolic often cut short by _banging_ their fingers, instead of the woof, with the heavy beam. Machinery relieves us from all such labor, and deprives our children of much real fun, for which there is no compensation. We almost regret those old-fashioned times, and often wonder if the elegancies and (supposed) increased comforts of our modern dwellings are a sufficient compensation for the multiplied labor and the necessity for so much more help which we are forced to employ. For though our mothers and grandmothers did more rough, homely work, we do not believe that they had half so hard a time in doing it as their daughters have in their efforts to teach modern servants how to perform the necessary labor of our present style of housekeeping. To weave a web of cloth is but child’s play, compared to the worry and disappointment and mortification that cause our modern housekeepers to “die deaths daily,” through the utter incompetency of those they are compelled to have about them. The tyranny of our modern style of living increases the proper amount of work to be done far beyond what one pair of hands can perform. We think the deterioration is in the _servants_, and not in the mistresses. With all loving respect for our mothers and grandmothers, we feel confident that their daughters’ executive ability is equal to their own.