“Then why do you look for another?”
“I am not going to another place.”
“What, Mary, are you going to learn a trade?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Why, then, what do you mean to do?”
“I expect to keep house myself, ma’am,” said she, laughing and blushing.
“Oh ho!” said I, “that is it;” and so in two weeks I lost the best little girl in the world: peace to her memory.
After this came an interregnum, which put me in mind of the chapter in Chronicles that I used to read with great delight when a child, where Basha, and Elah, and Tibni, and Zimri, and Omri, one after the other, came on to the throne of Israel, all in the compass of half a dozen verses. 493 We had one old woman, who stayed a week, and went away with the misery in her tooth; one young woman, who ran away and got married; one cook, who came at night and went off before light in the morning; one very clever girl, who stayed a month, and then went away because her mother was sick; another, who stayed six weeks, and was taken with the fever herself; and during all this time, who can speak the damage and destruction wrought in the domestic paraphernalia by passing through these multiplied hands?
What shall we do? Shall we give up houses, have no furniture to take care of, keep merely a bag of meal, a porridge pot, and a pudding stick, and sit in our tent door in real patriarchal independence? What shall we do?