g like
them, with no more rights to be respected, no more moral
responsibility, and left without even serving my notice. Clerking I
tried "just for fun." If all people who came to trade were like some,
it would be the pleasantest, easiest work imaginable; if all were like
others, the veriest torment. It was an excellent place to study human
nature, but made me somewhat cynical. My sewing-machine had fits and
gave me a back-ache, so I've locked it up until some one invents a
motive-power that can be applied to house-work, washing, churning,
mincing meat and vegetables, driving sewing-machines, and--if it only
could--kneading bread, sweeping floors, washing dishes, ironing
clothes, and making beds. My book agency was undertaken for the sake
of travel,--of learning something, not only of the land we live in,
but of its people and homes. If I had gone from house to house and
with malice aforethought begged an outright gift of a sum equal to my
commission on each book, I should have felt more self-approval than in
asking people to buy what I had not the slightest reason to suppose
they wanted.

Now I'm sure you are beginning to think me one of the disagreeably
strong-minded, who think the whole world has gone astray when it's
only themselves who are out of tune, but, truly, I'm not; only I don't
like to be or to feel idle and useless, nor yet to be constantly
striving to do from a sense of duty what is positively distasteful.

Like many other important discoveries, my aptness for house-work was
found out by accident. Our next neighbor happened to be thrown,
without a word of warning, into one of those dreadful whirlpools in
regard to help, to which even the best regulated households are
liable. My services, charitably volunteered as temporary relief, were
gladly accepted, and the result on my part was two years of pleasant
and profitable labor. All I earned was clear profit, and I had the
satisfaction of knowing I saved the family many times over what was
paid me. I'm converted beyond the possibility of backsliding to this
truth: that there is no work so fit and pleasant, so profitable and
improving, to the mass of womankind,--rich or poor, wise or
unlearned, strong or weak,--yes, proud or meek,--as the care and
control of a home; none so worthy of thorough study, none so full of
opportunity for exercising all the better bodily and mental powers,
from mere mechanical and muscular skill, up through philosophy and
science,