Stains may usually be removed from aluminum pots with silver-soap. Whitening such pots with acids is not a very wise thing to do. The better way is to reserve them for delicate uses, they will then not become seriously discoloured. Do not wash articles made of wood in water in which other things have been washed, for wood absorbs grease. Nor is it well to scour them with a brush or a soap coarse enough to roughen their surfaces. Iron pots and pans cannot be scrubbed too vigorously. Scrub the frying pan until the inside feels like wet, black satin; it is then truly clean. Both powdered pumice-stone and salt are good for scouring iron or tin articles which are smoked or stained. Unless precautions are taken, food fried or baked in new pans will stick to them, and will not brown. A new iron frying pan should be scrubbed hard with soap and sand or ashes, and should then have water boiled in it. New cake and bread tins should be scoured, greased and baked. If you find that the kettle is becoming encrusted with lime from the water, boil vinegar in it. This quickly removes the encrustation if it has not been allowed to grow thick before the attempt is made. A careful housewife does not wash coffee pots and tea pots in dish water. She empties them, rinses them, scours them a little if they need it, rinses them again, scalds them and finally wipes them dry. The care of some kitchen contrivances begins before they are bought. That is, when buying such articles as potato mashers, egg beaters and their like, notice whether they have intricacies which will be hard to keep clean. Do not be dazzled by the marvellous mashing or beating performed by a demonstrator, but take the thing in your own hand and see whether it is smooth and simple, and whether there is a way in which it can be easily washed. It can be said of kitchen dish washing even more emphatically than of pantry dish washing, that going into it up to one's neck is no virtue; better keep out of it as much as possible. To make the work easy, to divest it of disgust, and even to find satisfaction in doing it, are evidences of skill and cleverness. If one does not take the satisfaction in making things clean previously referred to, or if one has not pleasant thoughts to think while washing pots, then one may pass the time like a rhythmic black mammie and croon and croon a tune which has no end. X THE CELLAR, FIRES, PLUMBING, ETC. IT IS more healthful to have a cellar--a _clean_ cellar--under a house than not to have one. And why?