"Is the Master's wife Head Matron here?"
"Yes."
"Then why does she not come and teach me to manage my department, and see that I do my duty? I go to you, and you tell me the other matrons know. I go to them, and they tell me so many conflicting things that I am bothered more than helped. Then if I ask some of them one thing, they wish to manage the whole, and come in, and give orders that produce such an effect that I am obliged to give others to countermand them. They give them in such a way, too, that my women are all stirred up, and it takes me a long time to get them settled down again. This morning, one of them told Mrs. Martin that she needn't come in here putting on airs, and giving off orders, when she was no better than the rest of them. I pretended not to hear it, for I really thought she provoked the answer. If there is a Head Matron, she ought to come to my rescue."
"The Master's wife is Supervisor," said the good-natured fellow, after thinking a few moments. He was anxious to make it right on her part.
Superfudge! I thought to myself. I said,—
"I wish she would supervise my place into order. Have you any printed directions?"
"Yes. I don't think they would do you much good, but I will bring them to you."
He did not offer to bring the Supervisor to me, or to take me to her. As I got acquainted with the affairs of the institution, I found that she was emphatically super to all of them except her own housekeeping. She had brilliancy enough to look after that, and see that it was done well. She had the ability, and she exercised it, to come or send down when her parlor, which was directly over the prisoners' kitchen, was too cold, to have the furnace door shut, or if it was too warm, to have it opened.
About a week after I went there she came in, probably my repeated inquiries had been reported to her, and gave me an order to have a room cleaned in the attic of the prison. It was one morning when we were in the midst of house-cleaning with a gang of men whitewashing in the prison.
I told her I didn't think it possible to attend to it that day.