I speak to those who have cellars. If not already done, thoroughly
purge this subterranean story of your house. Every decayed onion,
cabbage stump, potato vine or tuber, turnip, parsnip, carrot, and all
the dirt they have made, all straw and rubbish, rake them up and out
with them. The cellar is no place for them at any time of year. If you
still retain a few potatoes for table use, let them be picked over and
all decayed ones removed. One of the best housewives of our
acquaintance, greeted us not long since, with an invitation to come
and see her cellar: “I have swept down every cobweb, whitewashed the
walls, swept up the floor, and sowed it with salt.” Decayed vegetable
matter is a fertile cause of disease, and there is enough of it out of
doors, in this country, without heaping it up in the cellar for the
special purpose, it would almost seem, of breeding fevers. Whitewash
the walls, for lime purifies as well as beautifies. Rake down the
cobwebs, they are the infallible marks of a _slattern_. Every spider
that is allowed to peer out of his corner in a house, up-stairs or
down, undisturbed, points his long black leg in thanksgiving at the
housewife, “Hurra for folks that are not too particular.” Old legends
represent witches as addicted to riding brooms. I wish that many women
would get bewitched enough to do this, something more than they do.
Down cellar, then, with your broom. Look now; the window is perfectly
covered; there is a great sprawling gaunt spider in the corner and
half a dozen empty bugs hung up like scalps to commemorate his
triumphs; next to him is a great over-swollen potbellied fellow—for
all the world he looks like a huge glutton; then there is a sharp,
nimble, enterprising spider, below him, who has just opened an office
and is keen for business, preparing to inherit, like many other
fellows, his neighbor’s custom, who, having got rich fraudulently,
will soon burst; there, too, are several pale and shadowy spiders, who
look as if the cobwebs had kept them from the light until they had
become quite sallow and emaciated; then there are several little
round, shining-black, pestilent fellows, whose legs are so long in
proportion to their bodies, that they make one think of a little
potato with yard-long sprouts all over it. I say nothing of
crab-spiders on the window-sill, who, like metaphysicians, run
backward just as easy as forwards. Just look, too, my dear madam, at
the various patterns of their webs. Here is one from point to point
resembling a sheet-like shelf of dusty cotton, and running like a
tunnel, into a knot hole, where stands the venomous old fellow waiting
for flies, like a usurer waiting for customers. Another corner is
filled up with a web like a skein of tangled silk; then there is a
beautiful wheel, worked more beautifully than any lace-work, while
there are a multitude of base and lazy little spiders who, like many
of their betters, live on other folk’s webs. Well, we have talked long
enough; dash your brush into that spider-village, give it a dextrous
twirl, and with the whole population on the end of it, run to the door
and crush them! So much for spiders.
As to salt; the only advantage of salt in a cellar, that occurs to us,
is its effect in destroying snails, bugs, and that fungus vegetation
called mold. It will do this. But it attracts moisture from the
atmosphere and renders a cellar damp. If your cellar is very dry and
sandy, you may use salt without detriment. But if too damp it will
make the matter worse.