I. To please people.
II. To feed them in dainty ways.
III. To clothe them.
IV. To keep them orderly.
V. To teach them.
I. To please.--A woman must be a pleasant creature. Be sure that
people like the room better with you in it than out of it; and
take all pains to get the power of sympathy, and the habit of it.
II. Can you cook plain meats and dishes economically and
savourily? If not, make it your first business to learn, as you
find opportunity. When you can, advise, and personally help,
any poor woman within your reach who will be glad of help in
that matter; always avoiding impertinence or discourtesy of
interference. Acquaint yourself with the poor, not as their
patroness, but their friend: if then you can modestly recommend a
little more water in the pot, or half an hour's more boiling, or a
dainty bone they did not know of, you will have been useful indeed.
III. To clothe.--Set aside a quite fixed portion of your time for
making strong and pretty articles of dress of the best procurable
materials. You may use a sewing machine; but what work is to be
done (in order that it may be entirely sound) with finger and
thimble, is to be your especial business.
First-rate material, however costly, sound work, and such
prettiness as ingenious choice of colour and adaptation of
simple form will admit, are to be your aims. Head-dress may be
fantastic, if it be stout, clean, and consistently worn, as a
Norman paysanne's cap. And you will be more useful in getting up,
ironing, etc., a pretty cap for a poor girl who has not taste or
time to do it for herself, than in making flannel petticoats or
knitting stockings. But do both, and give--(don't be afraid of
giving;--Dorcas wasn't raised from the dead that modern clergymen
might call her a fool)--the things you make to those who verily
need them. What sort of persons these are, you have to find
out. It is a most important part of your work.
IV. To keep them orderly,--primarily clean, tidy, regular in
habits.--Begin by keeping things in order; soon you will be able
to keep people, also.
Early rising--on all grounds, is for yourself indispensable. You
must be at work by latest at six in summer and seven in winter. (Of
course that puts an end to evening parties, and so it is a blessed
condition in two directions at once.) Every day do a little bit
of housemaid's work in your own house, thoroughly, so as to be a
pattern of perfection in that kind. Your actual housemaid will
then follow your lead, if there's an atom of woman's spirit in
her--(if not, ask your mother to get another). Take a step or two
of stair, and a corner of the dining-room, and keep them polished
like bits of a Dutch picture.
If you have a garden, spend all spare minutes in it in actual
gardening. If not, get leave to take care of part of some friend's,
a poor person's, but always out of doors. Have nothing to do with
greenhouses, still less with hothouses.
When there are no flowers to be looked after, there are dead
leaves to be gathered, snow to be swept, or matting to be nailed,
and the like.
V. Teach--yourself first--to read with attention, and to remember
with affection, what deserves both, and nothing else. Never
read borrowed books. To be without books of your own is the
abyss of penury. Don't endure it. And when you've to buy them,
you'll think whether they're worth reading; which you had better,
on all accounts.
(Glacier catastrophe, page 22.)
With the peculiar scientific sagacity on which Professor Tyndall piques
himself, he has entirely omitted to inquire what would be the result
on a really brittle body,--say a sheet of glass, four miles long by
two hundred feet thick, (A to B, in this figure, greatly exaggerates
the proportion in depth,) of being pushed down over a bed of rocks
of any given probable outline--say C to D. Does he suppose it would
adhere to them like a tapering leech, in the line given between C
and D? The third sketch shows the actual condition of a portion of a
glacier flowing from E to F over such a group of rocks as the lower
bed of the Glacier des Bois once presented. Professor Tyndall has
not even thought of explaining what course the lines of lower motion,
or subsidence, (in ice of the various depths roughly suggested by the
dots) would follow on any hypothesis; for, admitting even Professor
Ramsay's theory, that the glacier cut its own bed--(though it would
be just as rational to think that its own dish was made for itself by
a custard pudding)--still the rocks must have had some irregularity
in shape to begin with, and are not cut, even now, as smooth as a
silver spoon.