Nothing presents so forlorn an appearance as battered and neglected finery of any kind; and elegant pitchers with their noses knocked off, cut glass with cracked edges, and fragments of artistic teacups and saucers on a tumbled tablecloth, have a peculiarly dismal appearance. In fact, we had really occasion to wonder at the perfectly weird and bewitched effect which one of our two Hibernian successors to the pretty Alice succeeded in establishing in our table department. Every caprice in the use and employment of dishes, short of serving cream in the gravy-boats and using the sugar-bowl for pickled oysters and the cream-pitcher for vinegar, seemed possible and permissible. My horror was completed one morning on finding a china hen, artistically represented as brooding on a nest, made to cover, not boiled eggs, but a lot of greasy hash, over which she sat so that her head and tail bewilderingly projected beyond the sides of the nest, instead of keeping lengthwise within it, as a respectable hen in her senses might be expected to do. 451 There certainly is a great amount of native vigor shown by these untrained Hibernians in always finding an unexpected wrong way of doing the simplest thing. It quite enlarges one’s ideas of human possibilities.
In a paroxysm of vexation, I reviled matrimony and Murphy O’Connor, who had stolen our household treasure, and further expressed my griefs, as elder sons are apt to do, by earnest expostulations with the maternal officer on the discouraging state of things; declaring most earnestly, morning, noon, and night, that all was going to ruin, that everything was being spoiled, that nothing was even decent, and that, if things went on so much longer, I should be obliged to go out and board,—by which style of remark I nearly drove that long-suffering woman frantic.
“Do be reasonable, Tom,” said she. “Can I make girls to order? Can I do anything more than try such as apply, when they seem to give promise of success? Delicacy of hand, neatness, nicety of eye, are not things likely to be cultivated in the Irish boarding-houses from which our candidates emerge. What chance have the most of them had to learn anything except the most ordinary rough housework? A trained girl is rare as a nugget of gold amid the sands of the washings; but let us persevere in trying, and one will come at last.”
“Well, I hope, at any rate, you have sent off that Bridget,” I said, in high disdain. “I verily believe, if that girl stays a week longer, I shall have to leave the house.”
“Compose yourself,” said my mother; “Bridget’s bundle is made up, and she is going. I’m sorry for her too, poor thing; for she seemed anxious to keep the place.”
At this moment the doorbell rang. “I presume that’s the new girl whom they have sent round for me to see,” said my mother.
I opened the door, and there in fact stood a girl dressed in a neat-fitting dark calico, with a straw bonnet, simply 452 tied with some dark ribbon, and a veil which concealed her face.
“Is Mrs. Seymour at home?”
“She is.”
“I was told that she wanted a girl.”