The Lady's Country Companion

Your letter, my dear Annie, informing me that you are about to be married and to settle in the country, has interested me exceedingly, as it reminds me of my own youth, when my first essays in housekeeping were made under circumstances very similar to those in which you will be placed. It is true I was not then married, but, as my mother was dead, the care of the house devolved on me; and I knew even less about household affairs than most girls of my age and rank in life, as my mother had an old and favourite housekeeper, who managed every thing, and who would not suffer the slightest interference in her department. When my mother died, this person left us; and my father, with a shattered constitution and a greatly diminished fortune, retired to a small estate he had in the country. I was then young and thoughtless; I had no sisters; and having, like you, been brought up in a town, I had no ideas of the country but as a place where eggs, cream, and fruit were in abundance; where I might keep as much poultry as I liked; and where there were shady lanes, and green fields abounding with pretty flowers.

The place we went to live at had a good house, commanding a splendid view; an excellent garden; three fish-ponds, and about thirty acres of grass land, which enabled us to keep cows and horses, without troubling us with any of the laborious duties of cultivating arable land.

At first I was enchanted with the change. I was never tired of feeding my poultry, watching the dairy-maid, and managing the fruit and flowers; but, alas! I soon found that there are few roses without thorns. My first trouble was three gentlemen calling on us one day unexpectedly, and my father asking them to stay dinner. We were seven miles from the town where we had formerly lived; and, though there was a small town within two miles of us, the road was bad, and the miles very long ones; while the town itself, when we reached it, was one of those provoking places the shopkeepers of which never have what is wanted, though they always say they had abundance of the required article the week before, and believe they shall have it again the week after. I need not enter into the details of my troubles in preparing for this well-remembered dinner. Meat was out of the question; and though I was enabled, with infinite difficulty, to give my father's friends enough to eat, no one but a young housekeeper in a similar situation can have any idea of what I suffered. The lesson, however, was not lost upon me; and you may easily imagine that ever afterwards I took care to have a cooked piece of hung beef, or ham, or some similar substantial article of food in the house, that I might be provided for a similar occurrence.