To let the cattle fodder themselves at the stack; they pull out and
trample more than they eat. They eat till the edge of appetite is
gone, and then daintily pick the choice parts; the residue, being
coarse and refuse, they will not afterwards touch.
To sell half a stack of hay and leave the lower half open to rain and
snow. In feeding out, a hay knife should be used on the stack; in
selling, either dispose of the whole, or remove that which is left to
a shed or barn.
It is a shiftless trick to lie about stores and groceries, arguing
with men that you have _no time_, in a new country, for nice
farming—for making good fences; for smooth meadows without a stump;
for draining wet patches which disfigure fine fields.
To raise your own frogs in your own yard; to permit, year after year,
a dirty, stinking, mantled puddle to stand before your fence in the
street.
To plant orchards, and allow your cattle to eat the trees up. When
gnawed down, to save your money, by trying to nurse the stubs into
good trees, instead of getting fresh ones from the nursery.
To allow an orchard to have blank spaces, where trees have died, and
when the living trees begin to bear, to wake up and put young whips in
the vacant spots.
It is very shiftless to build your barnyard so that every rain shall
_drain_ it; to build your privy and dig your well close together; to
build a privy of more than seven feet square—some shiftless folks have
it of the size of the whole yard; to set it in the most exposed spot
on the premises; to set it at the very far end of the garden, for the
pleasure of traversing mud-puddles and labyrinths of wet weeds in
rainy days.
It is a dirty trick to make bread without washing one’s hands after
cleaning fish or chickens; to use an apron for a handkerchief; to use
a veteran handkerchief just from the wars for an apron; to use
milk-pans alternately for washbowls and milk. To wash dishes and baby
linen in the same tub, either alternately or altogether; to chew snuff
while you are cooking, for sometimes food will chance to be too highly
spiced. We have a distinct but unutterable remembrance of a cud of
tobacco in a dish of _hashed pork_—but it was before we were married!
A lady of our acquaintance, at a boarding-house, excited some fears
among her friends, by foaming at the mouth, of madness. In eating a
hash (made, doubtless, of every scrap from the table, not consumed the
day before), she found herself blessed with a mouthful of _hard soap_,
which only lathered the more, the more she washed at it. It is a
filthy thing to comb one’s hair in a small kitchen in the intervals of
cooking the breakfast; to use the bread trough for a cradle—a thing
which we have undoubtedly seen; to put trunks, boxes, baskets, with
sundry other utensils, under the bed where you keep the cake for
company; we have seen a dexterous housewife whip the bed-spread aside,
and bring forth, not what we feared, but a loaf-cake!
It is a dirty trick to wash children’s eyes in the pudding dish; not
that the sore eyes, but subsequent puddings, will not be benefited; to
wipe dishes and spoons on a hand-towel; to wrap warm bread in a dirty
table-cloth; to make and mold bread on a table innocent of washing for
weeks; to use dirty table-clothes for _sheets_, a practice of which we
have had experimental knowledge, once at least in our lives.
The standing plea of all slatterns and slovens is, that “everybody
must eat a peck of dirt before they die.” A peck? that would be a
mercy, a mere mouthful, in comparison of cooked cart-loads of dirt
which is to be eaten in steamboats, canal-boats, taverns, mansions,
huts and hovels.
TOBACCO TRICKS.—It is a filthy trick to use it at all; and it puts an
end to all our affected squeamishness at the Chinese taste, in eating
rats, cats, and bird’s nests. It is a filthy trick to let the
exquisite juice of tobacco trickle down the corners of one’s mouth; or
lie in splashes on one’s coat, or bosom; to squirt the juice all over
a clean floor, or upon a carpet, or baptismally to sprinkle a proud
pair of andirons the refulgent glory of the much-scouring housewife.
It is a vile economy to lay up for re-mastication a half-chewed cud;
to pocket a half-smoked cigar; and finally to be-drench one’s self
with tobacco juice, to so be-smoke one’s clothes that a man can be
scented as far off as a whale-ship can be smelt at sea.
It is a shiftless trick to snuff a candle with your fingers, or your
wife’s best scissors, to throw the snuff on the carpet, or on the
polished floor, and then to extinguish it by treading on it!
To borrow a choice book; to read it with unwashed hands, that have
been used in the charcoal bin, and finally to return it daubed on
every leaf with nose-blood spots, tobacco spatter, and dirty
finger-marks—this is a vile trick!
It is not altogether cleanly to use one’s knife to scrape boots, to
cut harness, to skin cats, to cut tobacco, and then to cut apples
which other people are to eat.
It is an unthrifty trick to bring in eggs from the barn in one’s coat
pocket, and then to sit down on them.
It is a filthy trick to borrow of or lend for others’ use, a
tooth-brush, or a tooth-pick; to pick one’s teeth at table with a
fork, or a jack-knife; to put your hat upon the dinner table among
the dishes; to spit generously into the fire, or at it, while the
hearth is covered with food set to warm; for sometimes a man hits what
he don’t aim at.
It is an unmannerly trick to neglect the scraper outside the door, but
to be scrupulous in cleaning your feet after you get inside, on the
carpet, rug, or andirons; to bring your drenched umbrella into the
entry, where a black puddle may leave to the housewife melancholy
evidence that you have been there.
It is soul-trying for a neat dairywoman to see her “man” watering the
horse out of her milk-bucket; or filtering horse-medicine through her
milk-strainer; or feeding his hogs with her water-pail; or, after
barn-work, to set the well-bucket outside the curb and wash his hands
out of it.