Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/544

526 hygienic effect. There is the instance of a penniless young man, threatened with fever in a strange country, shipping as a deck-hand to return and die among his people. During the voyage he scrubbed away the dirt from the ship-boards, and with it the disease that had invaded his life-craft. A story is also told of a family whose women were of the delicate, ailing sort. Misfortune obliged them to perform their own domestic work. What seemed for them a sad necessity proved itself a double blessing. They gained what they had never known before, robust health; and their enforced economy restored them to a prosperous condition.

Not all physicians are clear-sighted or independent enough to prescribe as did one of their number. A young lady supposed to be suffering with anæmia, nervous prostration, and other fashionable ills sent for the family doctor. "Is there anything I can do to get well?" she asked, after the usual questioning, "There is," answered he; "follow this prescription faithfully." The folded scrap of paper read as follows:

"One broom: use in two hours of house-work daily."

That domestic work is not without its aesthetic side many authors bear witness. George Eliot introduces us to Hetty Sorrel at the butter-making, and writes, "They are the prettiest attitudes and movements into which a pretty girl is thrown." But if dairy-work is rapidly taking a place beside spinning and weaving as one of the picturesque employments of the past, what there is to do about the house may be also gracefully done. And here, it may be said of this as of all other work, the spirit and care we put into it endow it with beauty as well as health.

Aside from the physical view of homely gymnastics, there is a social and an economic aspect. Courtship need not wait upon a problematic income if the fair Dorothea has not only a clear head but arms willing to take up the burden of life equally. Does Hermann need to toil? She deems it incumbent upon her, unless busy with young children, to earn her own living within the home or outside of it. When women shall have been educated to a keener sense of justice, they will no longer imagine they have discharged their debt to the community by adding a few beautifying touches to the household furniture! Nor, although they fulfill the higher and more exacting duties of a mother, will they thenceforth fold their hands and do nothing. To be a good father does not absolve a man from work, neither does being a good mother exempt a woman from her share in the maintenance of the home. The maiden of to-day is yet enslaved by caste culture; but the maiden of to-morrow may scorn to be merely ornamental or useless. She may be too proud to allow her husband to support her in idleness and may refuse to be re-enforced by a