s budget, in order that the
essential articles of cookery may be better prepared? What if ruffling,
embroidery, and the entire department of kindred fine arts, be thrown
out of her calculations, in providing for the clothing of a family? Many
a feeble woman has died of too much ruffling, as she patiently sat up
night after night sewing the thread of a precious, invaluable life into
elaborate articles which her children were none the healthier or more
virtuous for wearing.

Ideality is constantly ramifying and extending the department of the
toilette and the needle into a world of work and worry, wherein
distracted women wander up and down, seeing no end anywhere. The
sewing-machine was announced as a relief to these toils; but has it
proved so? We trow not. It only amounts to this,--that now there can be
seventy-two tucks on each little petticoat, instead of fifteen, as
before, and that twice as many garments are made up and held to be
necessary as formerly. The women still sew to the limit of human
endurance; and still the old proverb holds good, that woman's work is
never done.

In the matter of dress, much wear and tear of spirit and nerves may be
saved by not beginning to go in certain directions, well knowing that
they will take us beyond our resources of time, strength, and money.

There is one word of fear in the vocabulary of the women of our time
which must be pondered advisedly,--TRIMMING. In old times a good garment
was enough; nowadays a garment is nothing without trimming. Everything,
from the first article that the baby wears up to the elaborate dress of
the bride, must be trimmed at a rate that makes the trimming more than
the original article. A dress can be made in a day, but it cannot be
trimmed under two or three days. Let a faithful, conscientious woman
make up her mind how much of all this burden of life she will assume,
remembering wisely that there is no end to ideality in anything, and
that the only way to deal with many perplexing parts of life is to leave
them out altogether.

Mrs. Kirkland, in her very amusing account of her log-cabin experiences,
tells us of the great disquiet and inconvenience she had in attempting
to arrange in her lowly abode a most convenient clothes-press, which was
manifestly too large for the establishment. Having labored with the
cumbersome convenience for a great length of time, and with much
discomfort, she at last resigned the ordering of it to a brawny-armed