is that the people who do have to occupy
the basement never seem to appreciate what you are doing for them.
They appear to think you are merely amusing yourself.

The best day for doing the basement therefore is Easter Monday, when
you can legitimately send the whole staff (if any) away for a holiday,
and commandeer the entire kitchen equipment. This point is more
important than you may suppose; since if the staff are at home and you
want to use the basement bucket or the soft broom (both of which are
essential for efficient whitewashing) it is almost certain that they
will at the same time want to put them to some preposterous use of
their own; and this causes either delay or friction, probably both.
Besides, they keep bustling about behind you and saying, "'T't, 't't,"
or "_Busy_ to-day!" in a surprised voice. This is most irritating, and
an irritated painter always goes over the edges.

When you have got rid of the staff (if any) you can get to work on the
scullery and whitewash the ceiling. Whitewashing is much superior to
painting. Painting looks lovely while you are doing it, but is very
horrible when it is dry, being streaky or blistery or covered with
long hairs. Whitewash looks horrible while you are doing it, but
marvellous when it is dry, which is much more satisfactory. In a life
of average prosperity and no small public distinction, including an
intimacy with a professional tenor and two or three free lunches with
noblemen, I can recall few moments of such genuine rapture as the one
when you creep down to the basement to find the whitewash dry at last
and brilliant as the driven snow.

The other thing about whitewashing is that it is done with a broom,
not with a finicking brush and a small pot, but a good fat bucket
and the housemaid's soft-broom. In this way you can really get some
_bravura_ into your work. And, except perhaps for watering the garden
with a hose, there is no quicker way of making a really good mess.
Whitewashing by this method, I find that it takes much longer to
remove the whitewash from the floors and other places where it is not
intended to go than it does to put the whitewash on the places where
it is intended to go; but the charwoman does the removing on Easter
Tuesday, and I still think that that method is the best. Especially,
perhaps, for outside walls, because in one's artistic frenzy it is
usual to cover most of the rose-trees with whitewash; they look
then like those whitewa