But it was not company that occupied all the hours of so busy a dame as our diarist.  Though she had not to remodel her dresses in hot chase after the last novelty of the fashion-weekly, she had to superintend the manufacture of the stuff of which her maids’ gowns and her own morning-gowns were made, to say nothing of bed-and table-linen, etc.  Bridget in our day seems to think that to do a family washing is a labor of Hercules.  Yet seventy years ago before a towel could be washed the soap wherewith to cleanse it must be made at home; and this not by the aid of condensed lye or potash, but with lye drawn by a tedious process of filtering water through barrels or leach-tubs of hard-wood ashes.  The “setting” of these tubs was one of the first labors of the spring, and to see that Silvy or Jim poured on the water at regular intervals, and did not continue pouring after the lye had become “too weak to bear up an egg,” was a part of Betsey’s daily duty for some weeks.  Then came the soap-boiling in great iron kettles over the fire in the wide fireplace.  Apparently, this was not always a certain operation.  Science had not yet put her meddling but useful finger into the soap-pot, for madam sadly records that on the twenty-first of May she had superintended the soap-boiling, but had not been blessed with “good luck;” and on the third of June we find the suggestive entry, “Finished the soap-boiling to-day.”  Eleven days—­for we must of course count out the two Sundays—­eleven days of greasy, odorous soap-boiling!  We think that if we had been in madam’s slippers we should have allowed Sally, Silvy and the rest to try the virtues of the unaided waters of heaven upon the family washing, and when this ceased to be efficacious should have let the clothes be purified by fire.  But upon second thoughts, no:  it was too much trouble to make those clothes.

We are not yet through with the preparations for the washing.  The ancient housewife could not do without starch for her “ruffs and cuffs and fardingales,” and for her lord’s elaborately plaited ruffles.  Yet she could not buy a box of “Duryea’s best refined.”  The starch, like the soap, must be made at home.  “On this day,” writes our diarist, “had a bushel of wheat put in soak for starch;” and in another place we find the details of the starch-making process.  The wheat was put into a tub and covered with water.  As the chaff rose to the top it was skimmed off.  Each day the water was carefully turned off, without disturbing the wheat, and fresh water was added, until after several days there was nothing left but a hard and perfectly white mass in the bottom of the tub.  This mass was spread upon pewter platters and dried in the sun.

Another sore trouble was the breadmaking.  The great wheat-fields of the West were not then opened, and we find that the wheat was frequently “smutty;” hence, that “the barrel was bad,” which must sorely have tried the soul of the good housewife.  Woe be to Silvy if that damsel did not carry herself gingerly on the baking-day when the long, flat shovel removed from the cavernous brick oven only heavy and sticky lumps of baked dough, in place of the light white loaves which the painstaking housewife had a right to expect!