Other processes of housekeeping--dishwashing, scrubbing, and washing--prove equally difficult, and it is said that most of the women do things in the hardest possible way, chiefly because the processes are different here and they lack the technique to do their work in the easier way. Naturally, too, when work in the fields has occupied most of their time, they lack also habits of order and routine in their household tasks. The Italian women, especially those from southern Italy and Sicily, have also spoken of their difficulties in housekeeping under new conditions. In Italy the houses, even of the relatively well-to-do peasants, were two-room affairs with earthen floors and little furniture. The women had little time to give to the care of the house, and its comfort and order were not considered important. The experience in doing the family washing is said to typify the change. In Italy washing is done once a month, or at most, once a fortnight, in the poorer families. Clothes are placed in a great vat or tub of cold water, covered with a cloth on which is sprinkled wood ashes, and allowed to stand overnight. In the morning they are taken to a stream or fountain, and washed in running water. They are dried on trees and bushes in the bright, Italian sunlight. Such methods of laundry work do not teach the women anything about washing in this country, and they are said to make difficult work of it in many cases. They learn that clothes are boiled here, but they do not know which clothes to boil and which to wash without boiling; and as a result they often boil all sorts of clothing, colored and white, together. In Italy washing is a social function; here it is a task for each individual woman. DEMANDS OF AMERICAN COOKERY Cooking in this country varies in difficulty in the different national groups. In the case of the Lithuanians and Poles, for example, the old-country cooking is simple and easily done. Among others it is a fine art, requiring much time and skill. The Italian cooking, of course, is well known, as is also the Hungarian. Among the Bohemians and Croatians, too, the housewives are proverbially good cooks and spend long hours over the preparation of food. Croatian women in this country are said to regard American cookery with scorn. They say that Croatian women do not expect to get a meal in less than two or three hours, while here all the emphasis is on foods that can be prepared in twenty or thirty minutes.