Bailey, James Montgomery . They All Do It; or, Mr. Miggs of Danbury and his Neighbors Being a Faithful Record of What Befell the Miggses on Several Important Occasions ...
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HOUSE CLEANING.

    A WOMAN feels as if she has missed her destiny in some way if she has not arranged the cleaning-season so as to take in one wet, miserable Sunday.

    THERE is not a woman living who has the honesty to admit she likes to clean house. She realizes just how despicable it is, just how much misery it inflicts on those about her. That is the reason she dare not come out openly before the world, and boldly confess what is really a fact.




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    No stove is to be put up until the house is cleaned: it is immaterial what the weather is. And, in the week the rejuvenating is going on, a man has more misery thrust upon him, and driven into him, and filtered through him, than it would seem possible for one human being to hold.

    WHAT strikes a man as being almost supernaturally remarkable is the fact that house-cleaning and the line-storm invariably strike the earth at one and the same time. He can't very well protest against the heavens; and he well knows there is no earthly use of arguing the matter with his wife.

    IT has been satisfactorily demonstrated, that, when a man steps on a bar of soap which has been left on the top step, it will start down stairs with him, and, though having much the best start, will yet be overtaken and passed by him before it gets half way down. This sounds almost like an Eastern allegory; but every married man knows it is true.

    THERE is a fire in the kitchen, -- a good fire. If the man of the house feels cold, why don't he go in there? It is a good place, is the kitchen. Every fly in the family is in there to receive him, and sing to him, and prance around with him. The table is loaded with fly-specked dishes; and there is a four-


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gallon pail of boiling water on the stove, and mop-cloths and white-wash pails and tinware on the floor, with a poorly discriminating girl with red arms diving to and fro with a pan of hot water in her hands. It is a little singular that the half-frozen and wholly crazed man does not take to the kitchen for comfort.

    SHAKING a carpet is a feature of house-cleaning which thoroughly enlists the attention of the man of the house. It is done after dinner. The reason the woman selects this time is because he is dressed, and has to go back to business again without a chance to change his clothes. He carries the carpet out doors. It is not rolled up; it is in a wad shape: and he gathers it up in his arms, and starts for the door, with one end of the carpet dragging between his feet. He scorns to stop and roll it up. He has got his arms full. It presses into his bosom, and leaves rifts of sand and grit on his shirt-front; it bulges into his face, hot and dusty, and fills his mouth and nose and eyes. Then the long end gets under one foot as he is going down the back-stoop, and the other foot mounts up the breadth; and he stumbles, but catches himself, and prevents falling to the ground on his face by deliberately yet blindly jumping off the stoop. He finally gets the carpet on the line. It is very warm. There is a breeze from the west. He


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steps on the west side of the carpet, and hits it a lick with a stick: instantly the wind turns sharp around to the east, and he is ingulfed in dust. He darts around to the east side, and hits it another lick: the wind veers around to the west simultaneously; and he is plunged into a sneezing-fit, which seriously threatens to dislocate his neck. Then he pauses, and looks around uneasily. He sees that a carpet has the same effect on the wind as a sieveful of coal-ashes, and he doesn't understand it. He gets a clothes-pole, and stands around at the north end, and hits the carpet a terrible rap: the wind promptly sails around to the south, and catches him full in the face with a pint of dust before the pole has fairly left the carpet. He doesn't stop to reason now: he would be a jackass if he did. He grasps the pole with all his might, and madly smashes it against the carpet, and dances around the line, and coughs, and sneezes, and swears. After that, it is pulled down; and the hired girl, with the strength of an ox, takes hold of an end with him, and they proceed to shake it. His hands are in blisters across the palms; and his fingers, aching with the grasp on the pole, can seem to find no hold on the woof and warp. At every other shake they glide off, starting the nails, and causing his arms to tingle clear to the elbows; and, every time he picks up that carpet, he does it with renewed energy and a weaker


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backbone. The most we can hope for a man in this position is, that he is not a deacon of a church, and the hired girl a member of it.

    NO words can satisfactorily paint the bleakness, the dreariness, the dejection, the awful gloom, of a house being cleaned. The windows are out;,the carpets are up; and the dining-room table is full of dishes. Every other chair contains either a basin of water or a wet cloth or brush. The air is permeated with soap and wet and mould and new white-wash. All the furniture is piled promiscuously in the centre of the rooms, excepting what is left in a heap in the hall. In front of the bed-room closet-door is a rocking-chair full of bed-clothes; and, when the man wants to get there after an old coat, he has to climb and shove to get the door open, and, after once in, he has to push like a battering-ram to get out again. The pictures are arranged on the floor, leaning against the walls in a way to catch the unwary boot-heel and unthinking bed-post. There is a saucer of rusty tacks on the tete-a- tete, and a besmeared bottle of balsam on the what-not, and an empty ink-bottle in the card-basket; while the marble top centre-table contains an album, a piece of dried soap, an elegant lithograph, one tack-hammer, a half-can of potash, a beautiful scriptural motto on cardboard, and ninety-seven dead flies. It is this general upsetedness, this


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awful conglomeration, this dreadful uncertainty; which gives the home-circle its glow of terror to a man. This is what makes him move around as little as possible in the house, and causes him every other moment to smite his head, and gives him the vacant expression always inseparable with the face of a man whose wife is cleaning house. And she -- is she in pain? She has got on a torn dress, hitched up at one side sufficiently to reveal an unbuttoned shoe; there are flakes of white-wash in her hair and on her chin; her dress is wet; her fingers are parboiled, and her thumb has been split with a hammer: but her eye is as clear and bright as that of a major-general on field-day. She picks up a handful of skirts, and skims through the apartments, seeing five hundred things which should be done at once, and trying to do them; and every time she comes in reach of the dresser she snatches a look into the glass, and shoves a fresh hair-pin into her dilapidated coil. And thus planted in the debris, like a queen on her throne, she unblushingly asserts that "It's an awful job;" "Every thing is in wretched shape;" "I'll be so glad when this is over!" "It does seem as if my back will snap in two;" "I'm a good mind to say I'll never clean house again as long as I live." and then her mind unconsciously soars heavenward, and she wonders if there will be a house-cleaning season there, and, if not, how a


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heaven can be made of it. It is this speculation which gives her that dreamy expression when she is cutting your bread with the soap-knife.

    JUST such weather as this instils new life and animation into a man, and is apt to make him frolicsome. It stimulates him to racing, jumping up and down, clapping his hands, and feeling good generally. It so stimulated one of our merchants on Friday evening, and led him to invite his wife to catch him before be got round to the back-stoop. He started on a smart run; and she bore down after him at a creditable speed. He tore around the corner very much in earnest, and, stepping on a piece of ice, swung from his foothold, and went careening across ten feet of frozen ground, and brought up with considerable force against a pear-tree, -- a new variety, we believe. It was a genial spectacle to see the fond wife pounce on him, and hear her gleeful shouts of victory as he struggled madly to his feet, and besought her "not to make a darn fool of herself."




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WINTER IN DANBURY.