If one has difficulty in keeping an old or poor refrigerator sweet, one or two pieces of charcoal wrapped in gauze and laid in the corners will help. They will need renewing frequently. No disinfectant, however odourless and harmless, should be put into the refrigerator or into the water with which it is washed. Soda, borax or boracic acid answer the same purpose and hurt nothing. This chapter has concerned itself with what might be called the household genii. They have always, as old tales will tell you, been powerful and troublesome servants, yet withal valuable and fascinating. And, nowadays, we have many inventions for keeping them in order which would have made life easier for old-time sorcerers and magicians who sought to govern them by rubbing lamps and saying rhymes. XI MENUS AND MARKETING 1. MENUS HUMAN beings must eat. Under ordinary circumstances this is neither a disagreeable nor a despicable duty. Just now, however, it is a duty which is being made unduly conspicuous. Even those of us with good digestions and excellent appetites can hardly sit down to a meal without taking some thought concerning nutritive values and the use of beverages, things which should not be thought of except by housewives, doctors and nurses, whose business they are. People watching their own symptoms and doctoring themselves, people constantly observing their own thoughts and feelings, and people studying their own diet and digestions are all in the same class--they are all made ill by too much personal attention. Mr. G. K. Chesterton has said a wise word on the subject of keeping good health. It is: "The one supreme way of making all those processes go right, the processes of health and strength and grace and beauty, the one and only way of making certain of their accuracy, is to think about something else." He supports this idea with the command: "Take no thought what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink." The only person in a household who should busy herself with matters of diet is the housekeeper. The other people ought to be too busy and too interested to think of diet and digestion between meals, and too courteously occupied in being agreeable at table to think of them then. Knowledge concerning diet and digestion, both valuable and useless, can be had without asking. The grocer sends you with your purchases a pamphlet on nourishment; a restaurant menu furnishes a few thoughts on mastication; warnings against coffee drinking glare at you in the street cars; library shelves are crowded with books on health, food, and so on. When we go out to luncheon or have guests to dinner, matters of diet and digestion are talked of so freely that we seem to eat with a chart of the digestive tract before our mind's eye, and we suspiciously watch while innocent food, which unobserved might have given vitality and cheer, becomes a cause of weariness and depression.