Few children are born with a sensitive conscience regarding their work, so the mother will, at first, find it necessary to keep an eye on all the tasks performed by the willing, if often careless, girl.  Do not judge her too harshly.  Try to recall how you felt when you were a lazy, because a rapidly growing, girl; bear in mind that it is natural for kittens and all young creatures to be careless and giddy, and try to be gentle and forbearing while correcting and training her.  If she is good for anything, your care will be rewarded in years to come by seeing her trying to do all her work in life “as mamma does.”

While it is especially expedient that the girls receive this domestic training, the boys of the family should not be exempt from their share of the responsibility.  You need not dread that this kind of work will make your boy unmanly or effeminate.  It will rather teach him to be more considerate of women, more appreciative of the amount that his mother and sisters have to do, and less careless in imposing needless labor upon them.

Some mothers go so far as to instruct their sons in the delicate tasks of darning stockings, and repairing rents in their own clothes.  There is a vast difference in the skill manifested by different boys.  Some seem to have a natural aptitude for dainty work while others have fingers that are “all thumbs.”  One man, now a father, cherishes a tiny cushion of worsted cross-stitch made by himself when a child but five years of age.  He is deft with his fingers, and, as the saying is, “can turn his hand to anything.”  May it not be that the manipulation then acquired still serves him?

Another man tells laughingly how, when a boy at college, he would tie up the hole, in his socks with a piece of string, and then hammer the hard lump flat with a stone.  He could as easily make a gown as darn a stocking.  Tales such as this fill motherly souls with intense pity for the poor fellow so powerless to take care of his clothing, and so far from any woman-helper.  If possible, teach your boy enough of the rudiments of plain sewing to help him in an emergency, so that he can put on a button, or stitch up a rip, when absent from you.

As many men as women have a natural bias for cookery, and there are husbands not a few who insist on making all the salad eaten on their tables.

One branch of work in which boys are sinfully deficient is “putting things to rights.”  The floor of your son’s room may be littered with books, papers, cravats, soiled collars and cuffs, but he never thinks it his duty to pick them up and to keep his possessions in order.  About one man in a thousand is an exception to this rule, and thrice blessed is she who weds him.  It goes without saying in the household that by some occult principle of natural adaptation, there is always a “time” for a man to scatter abroad and for a woman to gather together.  Mother or sister attends to “the boy’s things.”  Why has the boy any