e making everything as
agreeable as possible for everybody."[83]

Alexander Hamilton found life in his domestic circle so pleasant that he
declared he resigned his seat in Washington's cabinet to enjoy more
freely such happiness. Brooks in her _Dames and Daughters of Colonial
Days_,[84] gives us a pleasing picture of Mrs. Hamilton, "seated at the
table cutting slices of bread and spreading them with butter for the
younger boys, who, standing by her side, read in turn a chapter in the
Bible or a portion of Goldsmith's _Rome_. When the lessons were finished
the father and the elder children were called to breakfast, after which
the boys were packed off to school." "You cannot imagine how domestic I
am becoming," Hamilton writes. "I sigh for nothing but the society of my
wife and baby."

_III. Domestic Toil and Strain_

Despite the charm of colonial home life, however, the strain of that
life upon womankind was far greater than is the strain of modern
domestic duties. In New England this was probably more true than in the
South; for servants were far less plentiful in the North than in
Virginia and the Carolinas. But, on the other hand, the very number of
the domestics in the slave colonies added to the duties and anxieties of
the Southern woman; for genuine executive ability was required in
maintaining order and in feeding, clothing, and caring for the childish,
shiftless, unthinking negroes of the plantation. In the South the slaves
relieved the women of the middle and upper classes of almost manual
labor, and in spite of the constant watchfulness and tact required of
the Southern colonial dame, she possibly found domestic life somewhat
easier than did her sister to the North. The dreary drudgery, the
intense physical labor required of the colonial housewife was of such a
nature that the woman of to-day can scarcely comprehend it. Aside from
the astonishing number of child-births and child-deaths, aside too from
the natural privations, dangers, ravages of war, accidents and diseases,
incident to the settlement of a new country, there was the constant
drain upon the woman's physical strength through lack of those household
conveniences which every home maker now considers mere necessities. It
was a day of polished and sanded floors, and the proverbial neatness of
the colonial woman demanded that these be kept as bright as a mirror.
Many a hundred miles over those floors did the colonial dame travel--on
her knees. The