THE "PIZEN CLEAN” WOMAN.

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 1862, 11 February 1880, Page 3

THE "PIZEN CLEAN” WOMAN.

Cleanliness is an excellent acquirement. It is so groat an acquirement that one does not wonder that the sentence “ Cleanliness is next to godliness ” was popularly supposed, for an indefinite period, to be a quotation from the Bible. Cleanliness is the chief distinction between the tramp and many millionaires, albeit there have been many millionaires who could not claim even this advantage over the tramp. But the sentence, ‘‘Cleanliness is next to godliness, cannot be found in the Bible, nevertheless. You cannot have too much godliness,” too much temperance, too much discretion, too much wisdom, but you can have too much neatness. There have been over-neat men. We have met one or two in our time. They always get up in the night to eat, and are enemies of sleep as they are of dirt. But they are not so numerous or so pestiferous as the over-neat woman. Who has not met the over-neat woman ? We do not need to describe her, but we will. Revenge is sweet. She makes her husband exchange his boots for slippers on the doorstep. No matter how low the thermometer or barometer, the poor fellow must doff his boots in the porch. Is he wet ? He must stay on the stoop till he has done dripping. Consumption ? What is that compared with a soiled carpet ? The small bey, what a life he leads with such a mother! Followed about by a dustpan and brush and a scolding voice (the hyperneat woman is always cross) all of childhood’s days, he early runs to a clubroom or a beer saloon, where he can see a little rubbish, and find the luxury of dirt. We once knew a lady of this character who, when lightning providentially struck her house and killed a servant, swept up the evidencing dirt the shock had dislodged before the coroner could be called.

These “pizen clean” women always hate to have company. “ Quests are so dirty, you know.” The parlor is kept dark and unused from year to year. The carpet would fade and dust would accrue. We once knew a woman who refused to open her parlor for the wedding of her daughter. “ The street is too dusty,” she said. She is dust now. They opened the parlor for the funeral, and one almost wonders that she did not turn over in her coffin. The over-neat woman cleans house twice a year. Twice a year the uncomfortable husband and children are made doubly uncomfortable. The weakness of the flesh alone deters her from house-cleaning every moon. The over-neat woman delights to make people uncomfortable. She is thin, dyspeptic, has nerve?, is troubled with dirt on the brain. Dirt on the brain is very wearing to the constitution, and the hyperneat woman nearly always dies young. If she did not, all her household would. Her husband always has another chance. This is a dispensation of Providence. We write with some feeling on this subject, although, thank God, we have only seen the over-neat woman afar off. But we have seen the lives of good men embittered, we have seen boys driven to ruin, and girls imbued with such a hatred of cleanliness that they have become very slatterns, by over-neat wives and mothers.

Ah, mother, do you not mind a cluttered floor, a little gravel or sand on the carpet, a finger mark on wall paper or mirror. The day may come when a little dirt spread by baby feet or laid on by busy baby fingers would be the gladdest eight in the world. “ We wandered sadly round the room. No relic could we find; No toy ef hers to soothe our gloom— She left not one behind. “ But look ! there is a misty trace, Faint, undefined and broken. Of fingers on the mirror’s face— A dear, though simple, token.” Ah, friends, how clean such dirt is !