It is easier, she says, to protect these articles than to remove the dust when it has once lodged in carvings and mouldings.

We girls made a frolic of our dusting, but we did it beautifully too.  I suppose you have all noticed what a difference it makes in work whether you go at it cheerfully or go at it as a task that you hate.  If you keep thinking how hard it is, and wishing you had somebody else to do it for you, and fretting and fuming, and pitying yourself, you are sure to have a horrid time.  But if you take hold of a thing in earnest and call it fun, you don’t get half so tired.

In sweeping take long light strokes, and do not use too heavy a broom.

“Milly,” said Lois, “do you honestly think sweeping is harder exercise than playing tennis or golf?”

I hesitated.  “I really don’t know.  One never thinks of hard or easy in any games out of doors; the air is so invigorating, they have a great advantage over house work in that way.”

“Well, for my part,” said Marjorie, “I like doing work that tells.  There is so much satisfaction in seeing the figures in the carpet come out brightly under my broom.  Alice, what did you do to make your reception-room so perfectly splendiferous?  Girls, look here!  You’d think this carpet had just come out of the warehouse.”

“Mother often tells Aunt Hetty,” said I, “to dip the end of the broom in a pail of water in which she has poured a little ammonia—­a teaspoonful to a gallon.  The ammonia takes off the dust, and refreshes the colors wonderfully.  We couldn’t keep house without it,” I finished, rather proudly.

“Did you bring some from home?” asked Marjorie, looking hurt.

“Why, of course not!  I asked your mother, and she gave me the bottle, and told me to take what I wanted.”

“A little coarse salt or some damp tea-leaves strewed over a carpet before sweeping adds ease to the cleansing process,” said Mrs. Downing, appearing on the scene and praising us for our thoroughness.  “The reason is that both the salt and the tea-leaves being moist keep down the light floating dust, which gives more trouble than the heavier dirt.  But now you will all be better for a short rest; so come into my snuggery, and have a gossip and a lunch, and then you may attack the enemy again.”

“Mrs. Downing, you are a darling,” exclaimed Lois, as we saw a platter of delicate sandwiches, and another of crisp ginger cookies, with a great pitcher of milk.  “We didn’t know that we were hungry; but now that I think about it, I, for one, am certain that I could not have lived much longer without something to supply the waste of my failing cellular tissue.”

“I think,” replied Mrs. Downing, “that we would often feel much better for stopping in our day’s work to take a little rest.  I often pause in the middle of my morning’s work and lie down for a half-hour, or I send to the kitchen and have a glass of hot milk brought me, with a crust or a cracker.  You girls would not wish to lie down, but you would often find that you felt much fresher if you just stopped and rested, or put on your jackets and hats and ran away for a breath of out-door air.  You would come back to your work like new beings.”