They should be put in a bathtub or sink when the rooms are cleaned, and sprayed and sponged and soaked. This helps to offset their unnatural life in warm, dry rooms. Plants thrive on attention. They love to be stirred, and watered, and sponged, and petted, and made much of. If we have only a few, we can treat them in this way, to their pleasure and our own.
_The Process._--We have spoken of the substances which more usually require the care of the housekeeper outside the kitchen and pantry, and of ways in which they can be cared for. It will be well now to describe the order in which cleaning is done, and to say a word about the appliances used.
The first thing when cleaning is to be done is to gather the appliances needed for the work. If possible one should have a broom closet in which all the objects used in cleaning can be kept, then no time is wasted in hunting them up. Two rows of hooks, one high and one low, in some secluded spot will do instead of a closet.
I do not say that one cannot clean a room with merely a broom and a duster. One can sweep everything with the broom, dust everything with the duster, and take the dust up on a newspaper. Good appliances, however, make work more thorough, more easy, and more interesting. Those which I suggest here are merely such as I know to be useful. As a woman learns her work and becomes more and more interested in it she will choose and invent appliances for herself.
[Illustration: Photograph by Helen W. Cooke
The following are the things I like to have to clean with:
A short step-ladder, not heavy. A wool mop head with two handles, one long, one short. A hair broom. A mop handle with two heavy floor cloths. A broom of medium weight, with a slim handle. A furniture beater. A long-handled dust pan. A flat paint brush. A whisk. A piece of chamois skin. Two cheese-cloth dusters, one damp, one dry. Two flannel dusters. Several dusting sheets.
Dusters and dusting sheets can be made of very inexpensive or old material, and they are things in which it is well not to stint oneself.
Wool-headed mops are usually called, in shops, piano dusters, but why should pianos have a monopoly of anything so comfortable and convenient? They are rather expensive but they last a long time, and can be washed perfectly clean. One can get along with one head and two handles, if necessary, by dusting the high things first, using the long handle, then the lower things and the floor, using the short handle. After this the head must be washed, for the floors will make it too dirty to use for walls. Wool gathers and holds dust more than any other substance I know.