one open fire in the house. It is not an extravagance, but an essential,
and economy may better come in at some other place.

Having settled these points as far as possible,--the question of
water-supply and ventilation being left to another chapter,--it is to be
remembered that the house is not merely a place to be made pleasant for
one's friends. They form only a small portion of the daily life; and the
first consideration should be: Is it so planned that the necessary and
inevitable work of the day can be accomplished with the least expenditure
of force? North and South, the kitchen is often the least-considered room
of the house; and, so long as the necessary meals are served up, the
difficulties that may have hedged about such serving are never counted. At
the South it is doubly so, and necessarily; old conditions having made
much consideration of convenience for servants an unthought-of thing.
With a throng of unemployed women and children, the question could only
be, how to secure some small portion of work for each one; and in such
case, the greater the inconveniences, the more chance for such employment.
Water could well be half a mile distant, when a dozen little darkies had
nothing to do but form a running line between house and spring; and so
with wood and kindling and all household necessities.

To-day, with the old service done away with once for all, and with a set
of new conditions governing every form of work, the Southern woman faces
difficulties to which her Northern or Western sister is an utter stranger;
faces them often with a patience and dignity beyond all praise, but still
with a hopelessness of better things, the necessary fruit of ignorance.
Old things are passed away, and the new order is yet too unfamiliar for
rules to have formulated and settled in any routine of action. While there
is, at the North, more intuitive and inherited sense of how things should
be done, there is on many points an almost equal ignorance, more