The Grenada Sentinel

AN AID TO MEMORY.

The Slate as an Adjunct In the Household Very, Very Useful.

The fear lest she shall forget is one of the terrors of a busy woman's life. It is precisely the forgotten thing that proves most disastrous. And the modern woman has so much to remember. Her brain is filled so full of insignificant trifles, as well as of momentous ones, that it is small wonder if she forget even so intimate a fact as her own age.

The mistake is that women exact of their memories such trustworthy service as they do, starting from the supposition that the memory ought to be as infinite in its capacity as space and as exact as a table of logarithms. But the capacity of the memory is limited, like the capacity of the stomach. It knows, if its owner doesn't, that it can't hold everything, and so sometimes it bolts, as any self-respecting member ought to, at having such a conglomerate and apparently unimportant lot of things thrust upon it for keeping. These are the occasions when Mrs. A. forgets Mrs. B.'s tea and doesn't even send cards, or when Mrs. B. forgets her appointment at the dentist's and has to pay for it just the same.

It is the wise woman who, after a few such occasions as these, learns to locate her memory somewhere outside of her where she can depend upon it to give her some kind of monition, in short, to make pencil and memorandum book do the work of memory, relegating to that precious capacity of the mind only such things as are worth remembering for their own sake, such as the argument in a new scientific work, or the criticism of a new painting.

No woman who has not tried it knows the comfort of having a book or a slate in which she can put confidence and her memory. If there are odds either way the slate is better than the book. A slate hanging in the kitchen upon which the cook or the mistress can jot down the household things she needs as fast as she knows she needs them, simplifies wonderfully the ordering of groceries.

A little slate hanging near the dressing table on which all matters of a personal kind are set down, is the same comfort to any woman. It takes her only a minute or two while she is dressing in the morning to run her eye down the list of matters that must be done that day and it gives her a chance to make some kind of a systematic plan for the conduct of affairs. For this purpose there are the daintiest little white slates in white frames and with silver gilt pencils. These may be more gratifying than the ordinary black stone slate, but they are not one whit more satisfying. The use of the slate as an aid to memory is a little thing. But the comfort of life is in little things.—Minneapolis Tribune.