Josephine Preston Peabody has written a lovely poem about a child watching her mother as she braids her hair. The child is delighted with the deftness of her mother's hands, and with the perfect rightness of the braids as every loop comes into its place and all of them are so quickly and so beautifully fitted about the head. That mother had by long practise found the exactly right way to manage that complicated piece of human industry, the "doing up" of a mass of long and wavy hair. She did it almost without thought. Her "motions" were perfectly smooth, exquisitely graceful, and adapted absolutely to the end desired through a series of separate acts composing all together a whole scientific process. And she was so accustomed to it as a whole and to all the separate details, that she could do it with a rhythm that was like music. When it was done she could give one little final pat and say, "There!" with a slight thrill of delight. Just so should it be with any of the intricate operations of the household laboratory. Just such a thrill of delight should be possible when the complicated piece of hand-work and machine-work called washing the dishes is finished. At the end one should be able to express a delighted "There!"--not because a dreaded and abhorrent quarter-of-an-hour was over, but because a piece of work necessary to human welfare has been turned off with firm conclusiveness and dispatch. The inefficient way of doing things is a too frequent experience. A farm housekeeper will bring a dish of cold potatoes from the kitchen, carry it all the way through the dining-room, set it down on a chair while she opens the door to the cellar, carry it haltingly down the stairs, and then set it down on a box because it is too dark to place it in the cupboard where it belongs. She does not want to take the pains to get a lamp, but she has to. She carefully lights the lamp, carries it down the cellar stairs, places it in a safe place, and then takes care of the potatoes. Then she comes back and carries a little plate of bacon that has been left and deposits it in the same careful way. Then follow the bread, the milk and the cream in pitchers; follow the cake, the jam, and many other things in little precious bits too good to be thrown away, all requiring a careful passage, each one at a time. It is good that she has so many beautiful and promising things to put away; but how different it would have been if she had been able to load all these things on the dummy and with one stroke of the arm to move it all downstairs. Then, O joy! if she had had the electric light to turn on in the cellar-way and down in the cellar cupboard, she could have gone downstairs with perfect safety and without fear, and she could have returned with a light heart, swung the wheeled tray into its place, and all would have been over in three minutes at the most, instead of taking twenty-five and being accomplished only by a vast expenditure of effort and nervous fear.