Mistress and Maid.

Dinah Mulock Craik.

Characters:

Selina. I’m sure I don’t know how we are to manage with Elizabeth. That greedy—

Hilary. And growing—

S. I say that greedy girl eats as much as both of us. And as for her clothes—her mother doesn’t keep her decent.

H. She would find it hard on three pounds a year.

S. Hilary, how dare you contradict me? I am only stating a plain fact.

H. And I another. But, indeed, I don’t want to talk, Selina.

S. You never do except when you are wished to be silent, and then your tongue goes like any race-horse.

H. Does it? Well, like Gilpin’s,

“It carries weight, it rides a race,

’Tis for a thousand pound!”

—and I only wish it were. Heigh-ho! If I could but earn a thousand pounds!

S. I’m sure she was as black as a chimney-sweep all to-day. Her pinafore had three rents in it, which she never thinks of mending, though I gave her needles and thread myself a week ago. She doesn’t know how to use them any more than a baby.

H. Possibly nobody ever taught her.

S. Yes, she went for a year to the National School, she says.

H. Well, her forte is certainly children. She is wonderfully patient with our troublesome scholars.

S. You always find something to say for her.

H. I should be ashamed if I could not find something to say for anybody who is always abused. How can I help it, Selina, if a girl fifteen years old is not a paragon of perfection? as we all are, if we only could find it out.

S. Her month ends to-morrow. Let her go.

H. And perhaps get in her place a story-teller, a tale-bearer, even a thief. By the bye, the first step in the civilization of the Polynesians was giving them clothes. Suppose we try the experiment with Elizabeth?