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Updated: July 29, 2025
Beyond the pond a sloping grassy sward showed green under an open beech and maple woods. On the hither side of the pond an orchard ran down hill to the water's edge, and at the nearer corner of the dam, among a clump of ancient willows, stood the Old Stone Mill, with house attached, and across the mill yard the shed and barn, all neat as a tidy housewife's kitchen.
The streets 1st, 2nd and 3rd, they call them of the cloud-cliff town are swept clean as a white housewife's floor. Inside, the three story houses are all whitewashed. To be sure, a hen and her flock occupy the roof of the first story.
The whole place was festooned with cobwebs, not light films, such as the housewife's broom sweeps away before they have become a permanent residence, but vast gray draperies, loaded with dust, sprinkled with yellow powder from the beams where the worms were gnawing day and night, the home of old, hairy spiders who had, lived there since they were eggs and would leave it for unborn spiders who would grow old and huge like themselves in it, long after the human tenants had left the mansion for a narrower home.
She gave a little sigh as she ended her enumeration of a housewife's tasks, and then banished the sigh with a smile. Evander found himself thinking that a man might count himself happy for whom this lady should sigh so at parting and smile so in welcome. But what he said was: "Against your next distillation I can give you a very praisable recipe for a cordial.
The Marquis himself knew nothing of the details of the management of the house or of his property. He would have been thunderstruck if he had been told of the excessive precautions needed "to make both ends of the year meet in December," to use the housewife's saying, and he was so near the end of his life, that every one shrank from opening his eyes.
But small blame attaches to the elder for his omission on this occasion, since his wife had long ago discouraged all amorous demonstrations on the part of her liege lord, and at this particular moment was filling the parting moments with a rattling list of directions concerning thread, buttons, hooks, needles, and all the many etceteras of an industrious housewife's basket.
As she washed and tidied and dusted, a true housewife's love growing up in her for the little house and its charming, old-world appointments a sort of mute relation between her and it, as though it accepted her for mistress, and she on her side vowed it a delicate and prudent care she thought how she could have delighted in this life which had opened upon her had it come to her a year ago.
Then, her purse being better filled than formerly, she visited the poor more than ever, and above all the young couples; and took a warm interest in their household matters, and gave them muslin articles of her own making, and sometimes sniffed the soup in a young housewife's pot, and took a fancy to it, and, if invited to taste it, paid her the compliment of eating a good plateful of it, and said it was much better soup than the chateau produced, and, what is stranger, thought so: and, whenever some peevish little brat set up a yell in its cradle and the father naturally enough shook his fist at the destroyer of his peace, Madame Raynal's lovely face filled with concern not for the sufferer but the pest, and she flew to it and rocked it and coaxed it and consoled it, till the young housewife smiled and stopped its mouth by other means.
A few steps brought us to the door of a handsome establishment two centuries old, or more; the front frescoed, and the interior neat and orderly as a New England housewife's. The floor upon which we entered from the street was paved with a species of marble, black and white, diamond shaped, but too suggestive of cold to be altogether pleasing.
It was part of every good housewife's business in those days to keep in store all manner of medicines, and to know how to concoct health-giving cordials from hundreds of wonder-working herbs.
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