Rensselaer Republican, Volume 14, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 January 1882 — HELP IN THE KITCHEN. [ARTICLE]

HELP IN THE KITCHEN.

i Experiences of a Lady of Laramie With a Few of Her Domestics. Boomerang. desire to advertise for a girt to do ral housework.” said a Laramie to the butioees man of the Boomg yesterday. ( I have had some r trouble and annoyance during the year, and would like, it I could, tO get a good girl who ditiers in many respects from those I have been wrestling with. Last fall I heard of a good girr who was working for a neighbor of mine, and went to work systematically to get her. Tfound out afterward that it was a put-up job on me, and that the neighbor wanted me to get the girl more out of revenge than anything else. The girl’s, name was Cleopatra. She wanted $27 per month,and the use of the piano. I was so sure that she was a good girl that I engaged her on that layout. Cleopatra had so m*ny lovers that we had to move the sofa into the kitchen on Sundays, and my husband and myself sat around on the floor, while Cleopatra wooed the festive mule-puncher. We wanted to throw all the home influences we could around Cleopatra, so that she would feel perfectly cheerful, arid like one of the family. She used to wear my dresses, when I was away, but when I asked her to let me wear her wardrobe she seemed hurt, and her whole system was churned up with convulsive sobs. By-and-bye my dresses got kind of shabby, as the result of continuous wear by Cleopatra and myself, and so she got discontented,and went away. Then I got a nice girl from Nebraska; but just as she had learnd to make a pie that would yield to the softening influences of time, she married a man? from Bitter creek, who was so cross-eyed that. When he wept, the scalding tears would roll flown tho back of his neck. I then secured a girl from the old country. She couldn’t speak the English language fluently, and so we didn’t have a very sociable time of it. When I would tell her to wash the dishes, she would generally black ’ the stove or bring in a scuttle ol coal. I used to pour out my soul to her sometimes, and ask her to confide in me, but she had a far-way look, like a man who cannot pay his board bill. One day at dinner I asked her to bringin the desert, but she didn’t grasp my meaning, and through some oversight brought in the dishrag on a tray. She used to wash the children’s faces with the stove rag, and brush their hair with the shoe brush, and in that way soon Won their esteem and regard. One day, while v e were at table, shq brought in the soup, and in an ungarded moment stuck about seven inches of her thumb in the hot soup, in order to get a more secure grip on the tureen. In the first impulse of coy and maidenly surprise she thoughtlessly dropped the tureen and soup in my husband’s lap. My husband is a shy and rather reticent man, but he rose with a graceful movement to his full height, and killed her with the carving knife, and kicked her gory remains under the table. After the inquest I got a hollow-eyed girl from Fort Collins. She was an orphan with pale hair that she used to work up in the hash. She was proud and impulsive in her nature.and ate everything in the house. We used to hear her in the middle of the night foraging around after cold pie and fragments of rich and expensive grub. She had a singular yearning for jam and an impassioned longing for preserves that we never succeeded in quenching. When the jelly and fruit cake gave out she would sadly turn her attention to cold ham and mustard,with the smouldering ruins of baked beans, and cold cabbage and vinegar. We stood it until groceries came up so, and apples got to be seven dollars and a half a barrel, and then we asked her to send in her resignation. Shortly after that my husband made an assignment. What I would like now is a good girl, not so much as a companion and confidential promoter of financial ruin, bat more to wrestle with-manuel labor in the kitchen at so much per .wrestle and board. lam not difficult to please, but I don’t want to pay the saihe salary that a cashier in/a bank gets, just for the sake of having.a pampered menial in the house who dosen’t do enough work to drive away her ennui.”