ALWAYS WASH DISHES
IMMEDIATELY AFTER MEALS
IT SAVES TROUBLE


"I'm afraid I don't always obey that precept," said the bookseller
as he poured the coffee. "Mrs. Mifflin hangs it there whenever she
goes away, to remind me. But, as our friend Samuel Butler says,
he that is stupid in little will also be stupid in much.
I have a different theory about dish-washing, and I please myself by
indulging it.

"I used to regard dish-washing merely as an ignoble chore,
a kind of hateful discipline which had to be undergone with knitted
brow and brazen fortitude. When my wife went away the first time,
I erected a reading stand and an electric light over the sink,
and used to read while my hands went automatically through base gestures
of purification. I made the great spirits of literature partners
of my sorrow, and learned by heart a good deal of Paradise Lost
and of Walt Mason, while I soused and wallowed among pots and pans.
I used to comfort myself with two lines of Keats:


'The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores----'


Then a new conception of the matter struck me. It is intolerable
for a human being to go on doing any task as a penance, under duress.
No matter what the work is, one must spiritualize it in some way,