SELECTED
RULES OF HEALTH FOR MARRIED LADIES.
Get up at three o’clock in the morning, clean out the stoves, take up the ashes, sweep the front sidewalk, and scrub the front steps, nurse the baby, put the mackerel to soak, build the fires, grind the coffee, get our your husbands things to warm, see the shirt aired, boil the mackerel, settle the coffee, set the table, rouse the house, carry up some hot water for shaving, to that brute of a lazy husband, and dry the morning paper. By this time you will have an appetite for breakfast. Hold the baby during the meal, as you like your breakfast cold.
After breakfast, wash the dishes, nurse the baby dust everything, wash the windows, wash and dress the baby – (that pantry wants cleaning out and scrubbing) – nurse the baby, draw the baby in his wagon five or six miles for the benefit of his health; nurse him when you return; out on the potatoes and the cabbage (nurse the baby) and the corn beef, (don’t forget to nurse the baby,) and the turnips, and (nurse the baby) sweep everything; take up the dinner, set the table, fill the castors, change the table-cloth, (there, the baby wants nursing.) – Eat your dinner, call again, and – nurse the baby.
After dinner, wash the dishes, gather up all the dirty clothes, and put them to soak, nurse the baby every half-hour, receive a dozen calls, interspersed with nursing the baby; drag the baby a mile or two, hurry home, make biscuits, pick up some codfish, cut some dried beef. Catnip tea for baby’s internal disarrangement; hold the baby an hour to quiet him, put some alcohol in the metre; baby a specimen of perpetual motion; tea ready, take yours cold, as usual.
After tea, wash up the dishes, put some fish to soak, chop some hash, send for more sugar, (gracious! how the sugar does go – and thirteen cents a pound!) get down the stockings and darn them – keep on nursing the baby – wait up till twelve o’clock nursing the baby, till husband comes with a double shuffle on the front steps, a decided difficulty in finding the stairway, and a determination to sleep in the back-yard. Drag him up stairs to bed, then nurse the baby and go to sleep. Women in delicate health will find the above practice will either kill or cure them.