The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, July 20, 1902, Page 6

Girls by the Score Who Rre Being Taught t0 Prepare a2 Meal and to Do the score are 1 c s hools of S: by the score, who learn t never , are being W to ge hool or school o the Bu cooking and ste come from or sew? or tehe B3 may pick up a r mothers then again to understand the slight- ut it other than when some- her cook thing is wrong, doesn't know wh The cook takes ad- vantage of the sit > the result is poorly eook: SR and & new queen about once a month. That does not t But with this to know the whys everything pertaining to tk an > culinary de- partment The girls at the Denman School are shown the walue of cl That comes first of all hing s taught that is really e certain rules must be complied w ere are aprons that envelope their mis- tresses, armlets, pads for handling hot @ishes and caps. All these tend to made & perfect cook or a neat waitress In@ividual work s the rule and while the work is off termed ookery,” it is more prope a course in household sclence, &s in addi cooking somet: the nursing serving of meals est advantage for chil Miss Whitaker, the supervisor, aims to bring the subject into plain ew ryday home life. The plainest and the easiest subjects are fully explained. The serap- ing of potatoes, the topping of celery and the peeling of turnips is all thoroughly discussed. Economy is a strong point, nothing i& wasted. Food is the pivot on which the temperance and labor ques- tions revolve, 5o girls are taught how to make the best use of money in buying food and then the best way to prepare it. They are told that “the way to 2 man's heart s through his stomach.” If such is the case, is it not also the way to his bealth, his happiness and his mental capacity? Bo you see they have a variety of good things explained and expourded to them. The room which is devoted to this sclence is a very large one and the stove 1 to a know arrangements sre put in the form of a square o 2s to enable the instructor to see them all at once. Her table stands at the head of the room, and when she says, “Hold the cel- ery this way and your knife 50, they can see and do it exactly. For the quick- est way to do a thing is to copy it. After preparing the vegetables the wa- ter is heated and they are put in, salted and cooked properly. It is one thing to cook and another to cook in such a fashion that all the nutrition is left. If your mother told you to have dinner 1 under way before she got home from ee, and if she left caulifiowe es, how many of you would and art know whether the water should be hot or not before putting them in? It is a thing that has puzzled more than one young o and many others that cir- cumstances get the better of. t is one thing that Miss Whitaker 2 every girl cooks f and then e of an emer- n is biscuit- ully watch Miss d then they do likewi s a cupful of flour they 10w that she does not mean as muc flour 2 She means ex- —a cup full. actly M been spoiled becaus receipt called for a cupful of flour the cook put in a cup and a qu aping cup or s; T cz and they roll are cut out and put on Then the oven is tested e proper moment they are at in and watched untfl they toward the door. the anxious moment! right? As good as m turn their 1 fac com: Are ther can h girl takes one up and hing about he breal About hal m simply until the butter comes their they commence nibk g and and, if they please, generally a hearty meal of them and pping one into their pockets to show mother. Just to prove that the cooking at school isn't a sham, don’t you see? Then comes frying, roasting and stew- ing. An Irish stew is not so difficult to make, but when it is made well it is very good, and best of all, as the Irish- man says, “it sticks to the ribs.’” The stew lesson is & good one, as it involves 80 many processes. Vegetables, meat and gravy. And when that much has been thoroughly mastered the rest goes not seem so hard. Pastry is not tampered with, only plain cooking. But even so if a girl really likes it rest assured she will never give it up after a good foundation has been laid One appetizing dish that has won the ) THE praise of the entire family means another trial at something more elaborate, more delicate. A fallure means twitting and unmerciful teasing from the younger people and “never mind, you'll do better next time' from hizing mother. Both of which act as a’spur to drive one on to victor: But while the girls are learning how to show thelr undisputed authority over pots and pans it is also instilled into them that the table is not to be neglected by any means, and that to taste its best food must be served attractively. A dining table is pulled into the center of the room, and it is absolutely bare. Two girls, called the housekeepers, by the way, are told to set it for breakfast, and to remember that the table should be bright and cheerful. The colored dishes are used, as they make the table look brighter, as it is a great mistake to thin] that “any old thing will do for breakfast.’ Tn many Instances the family is brought together at only the morning and evening meals, and it is much nicer if the day is commenced in a pleasant manner. If any mistakes are made the children soon find it out, and it is only when the table is absolutely fit that the rest of the . going on. SUNDAY CALL. THE (oA Cooxinvg TLASS oF ’ + tlass are told to observe minutely. And the flowers are not left out. It is Just as important for the girls to know how to arrange a dainty decoration as it is for them to understand the value of immaculate linen and pretty china. All these things have their place, and it cer- tainly is not a back one. - If the real idea of cdokery did not amount to much—as It freally does—the time wieuld not be wasted. Some of the lessons of life are taught there, and those amount to more than anything else. While housekeepers are being made char- acter is being bullt. Exactness, neat- ness, skillfulness and self-reliance are in- culcated or strengthened. The dally work is done with so much precision and deft- ness that it cannot fail to leave its im- print. What one learns in youth is very apt to be retained all the life through. And all this practical Instruction and the training that it Involves costs the public only one cent, or at the most a cent and a half a lesson. Think of it. Your daughter is learning to make bis- cuits, and it costs a mere cent. In the Denman Bchool alone fully 1300 girls bend and putter over their gas stoves and delve into the mysteries of cookery. It is said, “What a man eats that he 18”; so it remains entirely with the girls what he shall be. And every day you might see them intent on determining what the character of some lord'of crea- tion shall be. The only thing is, he is not aware what plotting and planning is And {f he did he probably wouldn’t care so long as his stomach was Rigid Examinations to Catch the Celor-Blind - Railroad QOfficial. OU hear very little nowadays about color blindness among rafl- road employes,” said the railroad manager, “because a very rigid and constant system of examina- tion is maint: Some very in- teresting experiments_are made in these examinations and ne odd incidents oc- cur. “The color inspector gets in time to be something of an amateur scientist and garners a considerable stock of knowl- edge. He learns, for one thing, that most people whose sense of color is deficient are blind to red, still others to green and only a few to violet. “A man blind to red cannot distinguish between red and green; neither can the green-blind. The red-blind man will see red, but it looks light green to him. The green to the green-blind is a light hue of red. “At first our inspection was confined en- tirely to the eyes of engineers and fire- men, but nowadays every man in the operative department,' whether switch- man, brakeman or train hand, must pass the tests prescribed. We find that about 5 per cent of the applicants have a de- fect of one kind or other, and re-examina- tions are necessary often because luck or boldness sometimes favors a man, and then once in a while a man develops blindess later oa. ed. — ’S r~E Oven ““When we first began the mspection we were constantly surprised at finding that some of our most careful engineers, men Who had driven engines for years without any accident that could be traced to mis- taken signals, were affected. It may seem odd that rafiroads happened to se- lect green and red for thelr danger sig- nals, the two colors upon which most cases of blindness occur, but it was sim- ply because no other colors have the luminous character of these that they can be seen further along more distinctly. “Much of this immunity is due in the first place to the fact that every old en- gineer on a road is famillar with the lo- cation of these signal lights. In the sec- ond place, supposing him to be red-blind, he is quick to discover the difference this kind of a lamp presents to him from the ordinary green. “He sees in the red lamp simply a lighter shade of green, and if aware of his defect strives to differentiate between the two. The danger, of course. lles in the 't that the difference is not sufficiently marked to him to make it possible all the time to distinguish it. “Once in a while we have run across cases in which a man once rejected for supposed colcr blindness successfully passed a second examination. This was not due to any defect in the last inspec- tion, but to the fact that the man had previously suffered from lack of color de- velopment. He simply did t know. Color blindness is' itself incurable. But there are so many different shades and hues that very few can pass an examina- tion save in the ordinary colors. “It may sound a little odd, but among laboring people, especially in large cities, there is a woeful lack of education, even in the simpler colors. If an afilicted per- son learn early enough in life that he is defective in his_coior sense he may oe able to keep the knowledge from others by learning to apply color designation to cbjects just as the child learns to name objects in the form in which they present themselves to him. “But when one of these color-blind per- sons attempts to deceive the examiners he falls down. It might be assumed that Lecause we want to find out if the men can distinguish between red and green lights we use these lights to make our examination. ““This, it will be admitted, seems to be the fair thing to do, but as trainmen YoT smvougur must learn to distinguish lghts in all sorts of weather, on foggy. damp nights as well as on clear nights, with distances constantly varying, it can readily be seen that these are not safe tests for the em- ploylng company. Some raflroad in- spectors use skeins of woolen yarn, others balls of yarn, others screens of various colors, “The first test system used was a very cumbersome one. It was invented by a Swedish professor, who used a batch of about a gross of skeins of all gradations of the more common colors. His method was to take one skein and then have his man pick out of the heap as many skeins as he could of the same color, disregard- ing light and dark shades; in short, to find all gradations of that color in the heap. This took too long, although it still stands as the most complete test. Colored glass and yarn balls form the usual im- plements of test nowadays. It is practi- cable with these to pick out the defective man. “Some of them betray their defects in their extreme caution, others in their con- fusion of colors. The quickest way to catch them is by using a bright red or bright green for matching purposes. The 4-blind man will carefully pick out dark ns and dark browns, while the green- ind will pick out greens and browns that are lighter than his sample. “When screens are used the same variety of tints is employed. and light is displayed through these to imitate the ap- pe: nce of signal lights under the differ- ert conditions of atmosphere and dis- tance. The ‘color-blind man is detected simply by altering the brightness of the light without changing the color. = “This is done by Increasing the thick- ness of the glass or diminishing the in- tensity of the light behind the glass. The color to which he is blind will simply ap- pear less brilliant than the other. “When an old employe falls we try to find him something to do in some other department, but there is little hope of his staying long at the business. It is hard on them, but necessary for public safety.”—New York Sun. e An iIncident showing the immense grow- ing power of mushrooms was unearthed recently at Stockton, Utah, when two large specimens of the fungl were found growing through a heavy coacrete floor. The owner of the building noticed that the conérete aud bitumen floor was being forced upward in the shape of two hil- locks. He could not account for the change In the smooth surface for seve days, until the bitumen split open and two mushreoms forced their wny upward into the fresh air. By actual measurement the mushroems grew through four inches of solid concrete and two inches of bitumen, and there was not a sign of a crack in the floor before they came through. Still Many Cave Dwellers Who Live in China. THE fact has escaped attention until recently that there are many cave awellers along a part of the Hoang Ho or Yellow Riyer. It happens that they are found on that part of the river whers the bridge on the railroad which Is to con neet Peking with Hankow on the Yang- tse is to be built; and August Slosse, a Belglan engineer who lived among them for six months while making studies for /the raflroad in that region, has been tell- ing some facts about the troglodytes. Along the bank of the river the people live in clay huts, but higher up, among the hills, only a short distance from the stream, they make for themselves perma- nent habitations dug in the hillsides. There are many villages of these caves, not only the habitations, but alse the temples, the shops and the storshouses for grain being nothing mere than these dark. artificlal caves. Many of the caves are nearly as spa- clous as the smaller New York flats. They are about nine feet high, ten or twelve feet in width and have a depth of ffty to sixty feet. They are dark and gloomy abodes, but the people who live in them think they are much preferable te the clay huts in which their neighbors live on the river bank. No adornment of the interior s attempted, excepting In the temples,whose walls are whitewashed and covered with rude paintings in lively col- ors, that, under the bright light which ts constantly burning, gives these sacred rooms quite a gaudy appearance. The only particular advantage the un- derground rooms seem to have is that they are cool in summer and warm in winter. The Inhabitants are gentle and even timid{ and Mr. Slosse said that be- ing unaccustomed to seeing whites, they almost invariably disappeared into thelr caves when they saw any of his party approaching. It was curious to see them at a distance working in their little flelds above or below their dwellings, only to find not a soul in sight upon nearer ap- proach. They would all mysteriously sink into, the ground and apparently there werevno human beings for a mile around, though undoubtedly there were thousands of “the - trd@lodytes in their burrows lis- tening at their doors for the footfalls of the intruding strangers. —_————— ‘Fhe copy of a certain novelist is a fear- some sight. On more than one occasion the arrival of a batch of MS. from this gentleman has led to trouble in the com- posing department. Quite recently the novellst in question fairly eclipsed himself. His copy was, in- deed, a puzzle. “Confound the fellow!" growled one of the comps. “He's enough to drive a man to drink. “Have you ever heard how he writes?" sclemnly demanded a fellow sufferer. “No,” was the reply. continued the other, “it's simple enough. Mr. Z. (the \novelist) owns : rough-haired terrier. When he feels like writing a story he whistles to the dog, dips his tail In the ink and plants him down on a sheet of paper. Then the nov- elist begins to think and teils the story to the dog. The brute wags his tafl— and there you are.”—Tit-Bits, ] / = =