Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 May 1875 — Putting to Rights. [ARTICLE]

Putting to Rights.

It is not the moving so much as the “ putting to rights” which is so exhaustive to the nervous forces of the entire family. This is due, in a great measure, to the carelessness in moving. When a man has got a great deal to do and little time to do it in he takes no thought for the future. He throws a half a dozen screws into a barrel with an idea that they will turn up all right when he wants them. The main pbject is to get them in some place now. So when he comes to put up the curtain fixtures in theipew house and finds the ingredients in a mass of confusion it is simply because he took them down that way and cared only for the present case, without any regard to future convenience. In putting up the pictures the nails are found in the bottom of a bureau drawer under a pile of towels, and the hammer is at the bottom of a barrel of stove-pipe in the cellar. Sometimes an hour is consumed in searching for a single stove-leg. The bread is found rolled up "in carpet in an upper bed-room, the coffee-pot tied up in the bedding, the sugar in a pile of carpet-rags, the tea canister in the scuttle under the flat-irons, the spoons in with a basket of empty medicine bottles, and the table-cloth tied up with a half bushel of tinware. The man does about all the work. The woman goes around with the broom and sweeps up all the soot, and feels of the moldings to see if they have been damaged, and examines the paint to see if it has been marred. She has been up the day before with a hired woman and cleaned the house, and she is very particular about its condition. If she sees a lump of dirt in the hail from the carman’s foot she carefully hoists it upon the dustpan, and says that all she is fit for is to slave ,her life out cleaning, without doing a bit of good, and then goes half way down the garden to thrww the debris away. She is ten minutes doing it, and a man would gave it one kick and send ft out doors in an instant. When she ain’t tumbling over the wrong articles, or misplacing the right ones, she is close at his heels giving advice, and asking him if he thinks a woman is made of cast-iron. When he puts down the carpet she stands on the breadth he is trying to stretch, and tells him she belieyes she will * drop dead in her tracks if she don’t get a chance to sit down pretty soon. Sometimes she is gone from sight for nearly half an hour, and the distant sounds of a hammer are heard. When she returns she has another finger in a rag, and smells stronger than ever of arnica. Then, when the bureau is being moved and her husband is struggling under his share till every muscle in his body is as stiff as steel and his face like a beet, and his eyes protruding, and the ends of his fingers aching most acutely, she is around again. They are going over the best carpet and she hastens back to him because his boots are muddy and with a show of dexterity tries to get a length of old rag carpet over the new in the way he is backing, and his feet catch in it, and he yells, and then he stumbles and yells again, and catches himself only to stumble once more and come down with the bureau on top of him and the carman on top ot the bureau. Then he jumps up and makes the most extraordinary statement at the top of his voice, and the carman limps around with his countenance full of reproach and she says she has always lived in a hog-pen and always expects to; and then goes to the next house to have a good crying spell and a cup of tea. — Danbury News. Concerning the coal strike and the supply of fuel in Philadelphia a correspondent says: “ Here we have the largest manufacturing city in the world with positively no more than three weeks’ supply of coal on hand, even for household uses. From the interior the most reliable information exists that few if any of the furnaces and other iron works have any fuel, even for present uses, while their previous production has been seriously interfered with.”