gs. Why not search for it?

CHAPTER XIV

AN OLD-FASHIONED VIRTUE

Ill Housewifery pricketh herself up with pride;
Good Housewifery tricketh her house as a bride.

Ill Housewifery lieth till ten of the clock;
Good Housewifery trieth to rise with the cock.

_Penny Magazine_, 1798.

CHAPTER XIV

AN OLD-FASHIONED VIRTUE

This may be considered a brief for the "old maid" of olden time; or
rather for the quality that she stands for in our dream and story life.
We have not given this so-called "old-maidishness" its rightful place
among the virtues. The quality deserves to be classified among the
highest expressions of the intellect. In the olden time, when the mother
was busy with her family of from two to twenty children, the mother's
unmarried sister was the "efficiency-clerk" of the big household. She
was the motor, the balance-wheel; she knew where everything was, to the
last sheaf of catnip; she put everything in its place and could go and
get whatever was wanted. Behind all this was her classifying mind.

That "old-maidishness" was composed of three elements: a fine
discrimination of values, an appreciation of little things as pivots for
greater things, and a love of orderliness. To her the first law of
heaven was her first law. Heaven never had a law till it had order; and
when the stars found that there was to be something more than a
fortuitous concourse of atoms in the universe, we know what they did:
they sang. In any house there will be more singing when orderliness
reigns there. But the household is a concourse of myriads of parts. We
cannot always sing that the house "is so full of a number of things"
that we think we "should all be as happy as kings." It is only when we
can keep good track of these things that we can be "as happy as kings."
This was a large part of the mission of the invaluable old maid in our
early centuries.

There was a great deal of system in the housekeeping of our ancestors.
Bags, basket and bundles were trained into the service of good order.
They cross-stitched numbers on the pillow-slips and on the sheets and on
the rare napery they had spun and woven with their own capable hands and
had bleached on their own soft grass-plots. They kept their "simples" in
carefully protected and distinctly labeled sheaves. Their piece-bags
were innumerable. They could go in the dark into the storeroom, put
their hand in behind things, feel unerringly for what they