a little book has just been
published in England, and reprinted in this country. It is by Mrs.
Warren, who is the writer of some half a dozen excellent hand-books of
household management. It professes to tell the story of the troubles of
a small household, that of a professional man, whose wife is reduced to
despair by the incompetence, the neglect, the wastefulness, the
untruthfulness, and the dishonesty of the servants, who come to her one
after another, each worse than the other. The causes of complaint are
exactly those from which American housewives suffer. Depending upon her
servants, whose deficiencies she is incapable of supplying herself, she
is sometimes unable to give her husband a wholesome meal, decently
served; and this preys upon her to such a degree that when he happens to
be kept away she fancies that he remains away voluntarily because his
home is unattractive. In her despair she proposes a "lady help" to him.
He scouts the suggestion. The thing is impossible, ridiculous. She
practises a pious deceit upon him; gets a lady help surreptitiously into
the house, and keeps her out of sight until order, and cleanliness, and
good dinners have subdued him into a proper frame of mind to receive
with meek acquiescence the announcement of the origin of this beneficent
change. Then all goes on happily. Money is saved, comfort supplants
wretchedness and confusion, and domestic life becomes enjoyable upon a
small income. It must be admitted that the authoress has it all her own
way. The lady help is a paragon. She is the niece of a distinguished man
of science, well bred, highly educated, self-respecting, but humble and
modest, kind-hearted, and without the least pride or false shame. She is
an angel of goodness to the under servant, who does the coarse work of
the house, and teaches her as if she were her younger sister. She
herself, although invited into the parlor and to sit at the family
table, prefers to remain in the kitchen, which she brings into such a
condition of neatness and order that it is a sort of little culinary
palace. Plainly such women cannot be always looked for in "lady helps,"
and, moreover, there is this difficulty: If it should get about, as it
surely would, that such a paragon of womanhood and housekeeping skill
was to be found, if she had only moderate personal attraction, the
kitchen over which she "presided" would be besieged by an army of
bachelors, among whom it would be quite out of the