e able to express a
delighted "There!"--not because a dreaded and abhorrent
quarter-of-an-hour was over, but because a piece of work necessary to
human welfare has been turned off with firm conclusiveness and dispatch.

The inefficient way of doing things is a too frequent experience. A farm
housekeeper will bring a dish of cold potatoes from the kitchen, carry
it all the way through the dining-room, set it down on a chair while she
opens the door to the cellar, carry it haltingly down the stairs, and
then set it down on a box because it is too dark to place it in the
cupboard where it belongs. She does not want to take the pains to get a
lamp, but she has to. She carefully lights the lamp, carries it down the
cellar stairs, places it in a safe place, and then takes care of the
potatoes. Then she comes back and carries a little plate of bacon that
has been left and deposits it in the same careful way. Then follow the
bread, the milk and the cream in pitchers; follow the cake, the jam, and
many other things in little precious bits too good to be thrown away,
all requiring a careful passage, each one at a time. It is good that she
has so many beautiful and promising things to put away; but how
different it would have been if she had been able to load all these
things on the dummy and with one stroke of the arm to move it all
downstairs. Then, O joy! if she had had the electric light to turn on in
the cellar-way and down in the cellar cupboard, she could have gone
downstairs with perfect safety and without fear, and she could have
returned with a light heart, swung the wheeled tray into its place, and
all would have been over in three minutes at the most, instead of taking
twenty-five and being accomplished only by a vast expenditure of effort
and nervous fear. The money that woman wasted in reduced energy and
nervousness causing doctor's bills, would have bought her a wheeled
tray, put in a dummy with pulley, rope, and weights, and paid the family
doctor's bill besides! Nothing can be done hygienically that is done in
the dark.

The Country Girl may practise for efficiency while she is waiting for
her perfect kitchen to materialize, by doing all in her power to make
herself save steps. To learn to make no useless passages across the
floor is to begin a conquest of one's own mind, to establish
self-control, and to utilize forethought.

"Think twice and step once," was a good motto. There is a one best way
to do all thin