Swish, Bang !

Why, it is a real relief to see the boiling hot suds and lye water dash around and deluge tables, walls, shelves, stove and floor once more, after all these years endurance of that vile, slimy, push-the-dirt-in-the-corners-and-leave-it-there way of mopping the horrible painted, grained and varnished kitchens of the present idiotic fashion. What! let the spiders build webs over the range and stay there the year around because the painted walls are too good to have hot suds thrown upon them?

Now, I hope that housekeeper from the Great Frying Pan Valley will stay away while I scald something. This is my water cure, and my old Mike and Slim Jim and Reddy know it is a good one. I want to scald the winter and spring mouldiness, the bugs and roaches, flies, muddaubers, daddy-longlegs, spiders, centipedes, mice,toads, snails and things, and there will be no reserved seats for spectators for a while. One afternoon, not long since, I went to show an old second of mine who is pastry cook at the Bendebeer House at Bingen-on-the-Bayou, how to make the Kaaterskill flannel rolls, sometimes called German puffs, that are just now the fashion, and while there had a chance to try the efficacy of boiling water. That house, too, has a painted and varnished kitchen with everything as inconveniently placed as all the modern improvements could possibly be, and altogether too nice for cleanliness. There are patent doors with patent springs to shut them up quick to keep the fresh air out; patent windows with nickel-plated fastenings and blinds and screens and shutters to keep the foul air in. The meat block is at the other end of the table distant from the broiler; the pastry room is two rooms distant from the oven; the kitchen floor is covered with oilcloth and a girl slimes it over with a mop at eleven every morning, and the cockroach population of that fine house is over a hundred millions (estimated). Seeing an odd million or so of the abominable insects roosting in a bunch under a low shelf near the range I could not resist the temptation to sling a two-quart dipper of hot boiling water. Brought them all down at one shot. But, as if that was not enough, from some painted and grained little cuddy hole underneath a lot of mice skipped out,for the hot water had fallen into a breeding place that had been undisturbed perhaps since the house was built. It being none of my funeral I left the place before the cook came home. Swash, Zip!

There's that housekeeper from Camp-meetingville looking again, and I guess she is laughing now. But, for pity's sake, what made her skip away so quick? There was no danger. Guess I can hit where I aim, if she can't, and did not aim her way. Boiling water and plenty of it, is a good thing to fight a mutinous boat's crew with. It is an infallible exterminator. This method of hydraulic scrubbing is new to her. Wants a hose and tank of boiling water to do it up perfectly. She was looking to see where the water goes when it is brushed off the tables and stove and falls from the walls. Where does she think it goes? Where does she think the flies comes from that she spends half her life fighting to death ? They come out of the ground, under damp floors where there are crumbs and sweepings and decaying matter. That is where this scalding lye and soap water is going and it will kill more flies in their infancy than her suffocating insect powder ever will. Insect powder does not kill. It is necessary to take up the vermin in their apparently dead state and burn them, otherwise, after a few hours they begin to kick, then get up and look around, shake themselves and go back to their old haunts.

It is all egregious folly making kitchens too good to stand boiling water. At some hotels that have been rebuilt two or three times and thereby cured of the first follies and made right at last. They have stone floors in the kitchens even when up stairs, and tile drains where the water may flow free. The old and natural style of kitchen had massive oaken beams and rafters, solid oaken tables and walls or wainscot that could be scrubbed. Every time I chop the fins and head off a fish, or strike abroiling chicken with the side of the cleaver to flatten it for the gridiron a spray of animal juices flies and strikes somewhere. It may be scarcely visible at one time yet it coats over the walls after a whlie. On the river we call the dividing walls bulkheads and we i used to scrub these bulkheads as thoroughly as the tables and floors and we found that after scrubbing with brooms dipped in a tub of hot water containing some lye or soap, if the water we rinsed off with was likewise boiling hot the boards dried much whiter than if rinsed off with cold water. "Oh! how white your tables are dry-

"Yes, of course they're white - did you think I was going to mop them?"

"Housekeeper says we can get a tub of boiling suds and do the pantry that way."

"Ah, wretched hypocrites, you can get awfully enthusastic over it now the work is done. Get out."

It is not so much of a pic-nic for the waiter girls when these summer houses fill up at last. The reason why the girls at that same Bendebeer House at Bingen-on-the-Bayou looked so pale and powdered and rouged so ridiculously was not because they were dissipated as some thought and said, but because the necessity of keeping their pink gowns starched out as wide, stiff and sharp almost as mowing machines robbed them of hours of sleep. I should like to know if anybody thought they could pay for all that laundry work out of their wages - their linen cuffs and little frilled aprons and white neck gear, fresh ever dinner time. They rose at three in the morning taking turns by squads to have the use of the laundry before the regular laundry hands came on; in the interval between dinner and supper they had to go and do something else to the duds and at night after the dining room doors were closed and the laundry hands had vacated the place they took possession of the starching and ironing tables for several hours at a spell. Misery loves company and they did not seem to know they were suffering as long as all the other girls had to go through the same ordeal. But it did make them pale and gaunt to a degree that the regular day work alone would not have done. Then they piled on the artificial colors.