But after the first year in the ‘Stretford Arms,’ I couldn’t do so much as I had done, because I had my dear little baby boy to think about, and I wasn’t quite so well and strong for a little time after that as I had been before, and Harry wouldn’t let me even do what I might have done.
He said my health was far more precious to him than anything else in the world, and that we’d much better pay a few pounds a year extra in wages than a lot of money in doctor’s bills. So after baby was born we had a nurse for him, and another housemaid, and a few months after that, when business kept on improving, and we found that we were getting a nice little hotel connection, we took on an odd man. His duties were to clean the boots, to carry the luggage up and down, to look after the pony, and, when we weren’t busy, he filled up his time with odd jobs and in the garden.
We were very glad we had him, for a nicer, civiller, more obliging fellow I never met with. It was quite a pleasure to ask him to do anything, because you saw at once that you had pleased him by giving him a chance of showing how useful he could be. There aren’t many of that sort about, so that we were lucky to get him.
He came to us in this way. We had been talking about having an odd man, and getting rid of the boy who looked after the pony and did the boots, etc., because the boy was the plague of our lives, and we never knew what he was going to be up to next. He was a boy named Dick, that we took on to oblige Mr. Wilkins, who recommended him as a smart boy; and there was another reason, which was that his grandmother, a very decent old woman, who lived in the village, couldn’t afford to keep him at home, and wanted him out somewhere where he could sleep on the premises.
We took him, and he certainly was smart. He had been educated at a good charity school (as I was myself, so I’ve nothing to say against that), but, unfortunately, he’d learnt to read and write and nothing very much else. He couldn’t cipher, and his writing was very bad, and his spelling not over grand. So he couldn’t be got into an office, and his poor old grandmother was worrying herself into the grave about what to do for him, when Mr. Wilkins mentioned him to Harry, and Harry, who’d just bought our pony, took him.
He was a nice-looking lad, and always very respectful, and spoke nicely, though using words above his station and in the wrong place; but there was no reliance to be placed upon him, and he forgot things he was told to do over and over again.
For a long time we couldn’t make out what made him so slow over his work, and so careless; but we found it out at last. He was a great reader, and took in a lot of trash, written for boys, about pirates and highwaymen, and all that sort of thing, and his head was filled with romantic nonsense instead of thinking about his work.
Harry found it out first one day going into the stables, when nobody had seen the boy for an hour, and finding him sitting down comfortably in one of the stalls smoking the end of a cigar, and reading “The Boy Highwayman.”
Harry boxed his ears for smoking in the stables, and was so mad with him he told him to go; but the boy began to cry, and Harry said he would give him another chance, but read him an awful lecture, saying he might burn us all down in our beds, and telling him if he read such rubbish he would come to be hanged.
He went on all right for a little while after that, though his work was not done properly; but one day our nursemaid, Lucy Jones, a nice, well-behaved girl of eighteen, came to me and asked me if she could speak to me about a private matter.