us children to do to keep the bare
rooms shining. Even here Frieda did the lion's share; it used to take
me all Saturday to accomplish what Frieda would do with half a dozen
turns of her capable hands. I did not like housework, but I loved
order; so I polished windows with a will, and even got some fun out of
scrubbing, by laying out the floor in patterns and tracing them all
around the room in a lively flurry of soapsuds.

There is a joy that comes from doing common things well, especially if
they seem hard to us. When I faced a day's housework I was half
paralyzed with a sense of inability, and I wasted precious minutes
walking around it, to see what a very hard task I had. But having
pitched in and conquered, it gave me an exquisite pleasure to survey
my work. My hair tousled and my dress tucked up, streaked arms bare to
the elbow, I would step on my heels over the damp, clean boards, and
pass my hand over chair rounds and table legs, to prove that no dust
was left. I could not wait to put my dress in order before running out
into the street to see how my windows shone. Every workman who carries
a dinner pail has these moments of keen delight in the product of his
drudgery. Men of genius, likewise, in their hours of relaxation from
their loftier tasks, prove this universal rule. I know a man who fills
a chair at a great university. I have seen him hold a roomful of
otherwise restless youths spellbound for an hour, while he discoursed
about the respective inhabitants of the earth and sea at a time when
nothing walked on fewer than four legs. And I have seen this scholar,
his ponderous tomes shelved for a space, turning over and over with
cherishing hands a letter-box that he had made out of card-board and
paste, and exhibiting it proudly to his friends. For the hand was the
first instrument of labor, that distinctive accomplishment by which
man finally raised himself above his cousins, the lower animals; and a
respect for the work of the hand survives as an instinct in all of us.

The stretch of weeks from June to September, when the schools were
closed, would have been hard to fill in had it not been for the public
library. At first I made myself a calendar of the vacation months, and
every morning I tore off a day, and comforted myself with the
decreasing number of vacation days. But after I discovered the public
library I was not impatient for the reopening of school. The library
did not open till one o'clock in t