Almost as engrossing as the stories, were little articles on how to get the best results with turnips, how to make the eyes sparkle, how to keep little chicks from getting head lice, how to remain always a mystery to your husband, how to keep sheets from fraying at the hems, how to make five hundred dollars out of a flock of fifty geese, how to tell fortunes with the tea cup, how to polish cut glass, how to keep the hands dainty and delicate, how to live so that the world is sweeter and sunnier for your presence, how to make orange marmalade out of carrots and how to treat a cow with a caked udder.
All of these "useful hints" Hat read with avidity, and many of them she tried to apply in her own household. She spent hours messing over a stew of mutton fat and cheap perfume in an attempt to make a homemade cold cream for beautifying the skin. After it had stood for a few days it turned rancid and she had to throw it out to the hogs. She became enthusiastic over the possibility of making a big income from geese, set a hundred eggs and hatched out seventy-five little geese, only to have the foxes feed fat on her flock. She mixed up the decoction to make the eyes sparkle; but it hurt her eyes and interfered with her sight. So she used it only once. She tried on Luke the receipt for remaining mysterious; but she was forced into the strong suspicion that he never even knew that anything unusual was affecting him in any way.
These failures did not, however, discourage her in the least. She read and experimented with the next month's collection with unabated enthusiasm. The magazine was her romance, her religion.
There were short poems in the paper, too. "Be a Beam of Sunshine," "Keep Smiling all the While," and "Never Let the Tear Drop Dim Your Eye," were characteristic titles. One poem, which made a deep impression on Hat, celebrated the joy of washing clothes. It described the deep satisfaction to be derived from rubbing, rinsing, bluing, and hanging out the family wash on the line. The constantly recurring refrain was, "And the Wind is Right to Dry." As Hat rubbed out her own faded cotton dresses and aprons and scrubbed manfully on the sweaty collars and wristbands of Luke's work shirts, even when she punished the washboard with his heavy denim overalls, stiffly encrusted with mud and axle grease and many other varieties of filth, and soused them up and down in the dirty, stinking, mouse-gray water, the words of this little poem lilted rhythmically through her mind, and she almost fooled herself into thinking that washing Luke's overalls was a delight. Who can say that the mail order sheet does not bring joy and comfort into the rural home? Nevertheless, Hat was glad when Luke came home one day with the information gleaned from Columbia Gibbs that overalls last twice as long if they are never allowed to see water.