That skilful card-player Mason was as completely stumped as if some one had raked down the stakes on a pair of deuces against his exhibit of the four aces. Nothing but the most gracious condescension and chaste humility of salutation had passed between him and his aunt's French maid; yet shrewd little Sudie, with her intuitive woman's instinct, had shot her arrow in the dark and cloven the wand.
She went out in the innocent simplicity of her childlike faith, and it was hours before she came to realize how utterly she had failed in stopping the execution of that deadly purpose.
How often is it the case with her sex that, having no other coin than the affections, so dear to themselves, they over-value them for others, and only know from finding them soiled and trampled in the mud how little they are estimated in the hard and selfish dealings of man with man! But the little girl went off, happy in her delusion. God bless the rest of heart from apprehension that it gave her!
But Mason had to slip aside into the hotel bar and drink a mighty jorum of brandy before he could rejoin his friends. As he thought of all the confounded annoyances and embarrassments growing out of the little girl's discovery, including the loss of her hand and fortune, the terse and pithy brevity of his summing-up of the situation was an epitome of Spartan eloquence. It was, "D—— it!"
Will Wallace Harney.
THE DOINGS AND GOINGS-ON OF HIRED GIRLS.
Leave the town and the highway, journey onward deep among the hills, and in their farthest nooks and crannies you will come to places where the hired girls are living happily. You will come to places where the hired girls do not long to be old nor long to be dead—spots where there are no vulgar, insulting rich, untrained to the management of servants and ignorant of the routine of good housework—neighborhoods where the maxim of the ancient noblesse of France, that only the low-born are hard with their hirelings, still prevails. In Mid New York, for instance, are regions sweet as Thessaly, hilly, shaggy with woods, and peopled by descendants of the Puritans bearing old Shakespearian names—Ford, Page, Peck and Scroop—a yeomanry on whom the rich soil of their present seats has had a powerful effect: they enjoy their hills in health and mellow content, and their servants live at ease with them.
The New York farmer of Puritan descent is a patriot. He can never enough gloat over the number of Britishers his ancestors killed at the battle of Lexington. He loves politics. He is great at voting. He stands up for his candidate almost to the fighting-point. Squires Catesby and Plunket did have a little fight at the Forge Hollow election; not actually coming to blows—that would be too absurd for men of their figure and property—but hunching and shouldering each other around the tavern bar-room until they hunched the stove over and the chairs and tables upside down. A farmer of their type has a mind busied in operating, American fashion, on every conceivable topic—you will see such a one in town, broad-shouldered as an Egyptian statue, matching silk for his wife after selling a herd of cattle—and this kind of man is not the one to be "snooping round the house" worrying his servants. His wife is like himself, a comfortable person to serve. It would be hard to find a more luxurious woman, one fonder of taking naps and of driving about the country paying visits—our opulent New York farmer has not the least suspicion that his wife can walk anywhere—and partly because of a paucity of fashionable calls and milliners' windows, partly because the country doctor is such a good one to make her think she needs medicine, she cultivates a gentle hypochondria, spins talk spider-like from her own frame, thinks she lives in a sort of human oven where she is in constant peril of being overdone, and so is tender of her domestics, lest they be overdone. The rich farmer's wife does not wash trencher nor scrape dish; she boils not, neither does she skin apple or potato; she occupies herself with fancy-work that would make Solomon in all his glory stare. You ought to see her best bedroom: it is a bower of bonbonnerie of her own make. Its treatment, as an architect would say, is in the Decorated pocketed style—pockets on the wall for papers; pockets for rags and scraps; a double pocket for slippers; one for your watch, one for your comb, one for lamplighters, one for burnt matches; ever so many others for what you can't guess; and all beaded, bugled, tasselled and embroidered to form a perfect zodiac of splendors.
Though the country wife is kind to her domestics, she has a knack of getting the best out of them. The girl who scorches things and boils tea as if some incantation of double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and teapot bubble, had got into her head—the girl who stands like a Stoughton bottle and bawls "Ma'am!" whenever she is spoken to—the slow girl who can't tell time, forgets to put on the teakettle, and never gets beyond "one I, one—two I, two," on the kitchen clock—the small servant with the bad cold who will sit by the parlor fire coughing, snuffing and breathing hard—the girl like an overgrown man who slobbers dish-water on the floor and steps in it—the Deutsche girl who spoils the parlor clock turning it upside down to dust it thoroughly,—these and worse become reliable people under the sway of the old-fashioned country housewife. The Deutsche girl becomes a paragon in the farmhouse, quickly falling into Yankee ways and picking up Yankee kitchen phrases, and turning them with a bold originality. "Them clothes is bone dry," says the Deutsche girl. "Oh land! yes: they got a bone drying to-day. I gave them clothes a bone rubbing and a bone boiling, and to-morrow they'll get a bone ironing, you bet," says she. Next to her rank the Dane and the Swede. The Irish girl is never a congenial inmate of the farmhouse. The Irish girl is too noisy and too much given to lying. The last might be endured—the farmer's wife would rather hear an Irish girl tell forty lies than sing one song—but the noise she makes talking to the butcher's boy, the peddler, the essence-man and the ash-gatherer is insufferable; and when the Irish rag-merchant bursts open the kitchen door roaring, "God bless you! you're a real lady; got any rags? don't sell to them theivin' Jews, they're villains; sold your rags to a man that pays more than me? divil a man in the county pays more than me," why, the farmhouse quiet is torn to ribbons. And then the Irish girl is cross to visitors, who form the solace and charm of country life. "I wants no lady-visitors around me; they makes too much bodderin' wid towels and wather; they're always a-washin' of theirselves. They wants a clean towel to every one of their tin fingers: they're afraid us gurrels sha'n't earn our wages. Give me men for my money: they ain't always a-cleanin' of theirselves," growls the Irish girl.