No girl of any species can compare with an oldish American hired girl. Give Sar' Ann her due. She works at a spanking pace; she is "poison clean;" she can do up a shirt fit for a funeral, and she is a dabster at cooking. In butchering or in haying and harvesting she will pitch in and work without a murmur until she is pale and damp with weariness, and at such times will let her hair go until her head looks like Encke's comet, one halo of frowse, with a frowsy knob in its periphery. Still, she will put up with no asperity from her mistress: "the foodle ages" are done with, look you! as to Sar' Ann. Let her mistress once reprimand her, she turns the tables on that lady slap, dab. "It's a poor story," ejaculates Sar' Ann, "for you to talk so, Mis' Fife. I've dug and delved for you six year, and run my daylights out of me, and I won't do it no longer. It's jaw, jaw, jaw with you till I'm worn to a shadder. I've spunked up now, Mis' Fife, and I'll light out. I never crep' nor crawled to nobody, and I won't begin now. I'll throw my dishcloth right smack up the chimbly, and I'll clear." If you have a servant who understands her rights and business better than you do yours, where are you? "Why, there you are," as the man in the play says.
In the farmhouse kitchen you sometimes find a girl rare, now-a-days, outside of old portraits, and one seen only in spots as sequestered as the haunts of the deer and wild-duck. She has hair of a burnished copper color, eyes so fair they reflect crystal sparkles of light from their lashes, a pure skin, round cheeks, a delicate cocked-up nose, a chin all weakness and a look of wistful propitiation. Another girl peculiar to country kitchens, not so rare, but delicious, is a fresh, dark nymph of a temperament both gay and imperturbable. This one has almost perfect beauty—black hair that should be crowned with water-cresses, black eyes with a thrilling glance, and a sudden, frank, enchanting smile. Perhaps you will say her nose and lips are a line too heavy: there is no skimping in her outlines. The country-people never find out that she is handsome. "Adeline would be quite handsome if she was not so dark," say they.
A well-to-do farmhouse, where the work is "done up" early, is a pleasant place to work in. Adeline has an hour of liberty every day in which she may stand in the door "dressed up," looking out over the meadows, or run to The Corners to "borry a teaspoonful of soda," or look over a newspaper. If Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoigne Cecil, marquis of Salisbury (what a sound that has!), were the farmer's guest, Adeline would condescend to talk to him during this hour when she is waiting for tea-time. "I guess you feel pretty lonesome over here," she would say; and when he replied that he felt "like a crumb of bread at the bottom of a trowsers pocket," as he probably would, she would try to amuse him with innocent rustic familiarity. It never occurs to her that she is not as good as "them kings" or anybody else, she has such an idea of her own smartness and respectability. At five o'clock she sits down to tea with her mistress. The men-folks take supper after milking is done, the farmer supping with his men that he may talk over the harvest. When there is company the hired people have all the good things going—jelly-cake sixteen streaks deep, floating islands, preserves, tarts, pound-sweet apples boiled in sweet cider, boiled tongue, inconceivable pickles, cabbage salad—everything. After a company supper the hired man is just able to crawl out and perch himself on the dooryard fence, where he sits blown up as by hydraulic pressure until bedtime brings him the deep satisfaction of a hired man's sleep.
A circumstance that makes farmhouse servitude agreeable is, that the hired girl's friends are welcome there. Her mother comes often to see her. This interesting old woman has a face dried down as if to last for ages, strong gray hair and a smile that drives back a score of wrinkles in her cheeks, being "tough as a biled owl." She wears a black bombazine dress, and under it a heavy quilted petticoat, in which she invariably sleeps, goodness gracious only knows why. She comes in with the remark, "Sorry to hender;" she calls flowers "blummies," houses, "housen," bouquets, "beaupots;" terminates her assertions with "'sfurzino" ("as far as I know"), and talks with a muffled yang-yang, as if she had an invisible tumor at the end of her nose. Her observations would remind you of something in Browning's Aristophanes' Apology—
You too, my Chrusomelolthian-Phaps
Girl-goldling-beetle-beauty,
for example. Her conversation has the effect of hasheesh for lengthening the apparent duration of time: the Happy Thought man would call it dry as an extinct volcano; it drives everybody to the wall; is a perfect battering-ram for that—all talk and no wool, you know. She is perpetually finding mares' nests and getting news by the "grapevine telegraph," and she is always looking for signs in the air, in the embers, in candle-snuff, in empty teacups, as if mysterious laws like Kepler's threaded the universe and she knew the clue to them. If the cat turns her tail to the fire, the hired girl's mother thinks something will happen. She has a great deal of trouble. "Trouble sticks to me," says she. She keeps turkeys which are creatures that assert their American origin by running away to the woods and going wild at every opportunity, and a respectable old lady in cap and spectacles cannot chase wild turkeys through the woods; besides, they insist on roosting in her neighbors' cherry trees, a proceeding sure to kill the trees. And she keeps a cow with a genius for opening gates. Her cow has a habit of standing meditatively before a garden gate swinging her tail, but suddenly, after looking cautiously round, she will hook one horn into the gate by a quick twirl of her head, and by giving it a series of searching shakes will unfasten the latch, after which she will shoulder herself into the garden and take off its cream in great content. These facts are calculated to inflict a wound on neighborly peace not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church-door, but all the king's horses and all the king's men could not make it whole again. The hired girl's mother keeps hens too, and being a lone woman lets them run round the house for company. In winter you will be surprised to see a hen's face looking from her parlor window with an air of being at home.
The hired girl's sister and sister's husband also come frequently to see her, riding in an old wagon drawn by a large, gray, famished horse that devours the farmer's oats by the bushel. The sister's husband is a carpenter by trade. He usually has a large boil or carbuncle on his arm that gives him leisure, and he sits by the kitchen fire with his chair tilted back, rubbing a grease spot on the wall from his bushy black hair and getting redder and redder in the face, talking about his boil until his head looks like a lampwick that has burned too long and needs snuffing. They stay until the sisters begin to quarrel. "Your coffee is dish-water and your gravy paste," sneers the hired girl's sister before she goes, alluding to the fact that thin coffee and fried pork gravy, in which are lumps that break on the tongue and fill the mouth with dry flour, are the vulnerable points of the farmhouse breakfast.
When there is a young girl in the kitchen, she is on good terms with the jingle-legged boys of the farm. She is interested in their pets, especially in that funny one of the bear tribe that has the head of a fox with shaggy whiskers round his sharp visage, and that sits on his hind legs and holds his food in his hands and looks around him when he eats, and that makes friends so insinuatingly with the puppies, kittens and ducks until he finds a chance to devour them—the raccoon. Of evenings, when the barefoot boys sit on the kitchen lounge tired with their long day's work, yet scuffling and knocking their elbows and knees together, she keeps up an incessant tittering with them. And in the beginning of the season, when they clear out the leavings of last year's pease, beans and seed-corn from the garret, she has a good time with the boys a-dodging the wasps that fly through the garret singing their bass buzz and carrying blobs of mud like boxing-gloves on their feet, and taking such irregular zig-zags their course cannot be foreseen. She wastes her time then watching quivering fights between spiders and unfortunate wasps that have become entangled in cobwebs among the rafters. "She has found a te-he's nest with a lot of ha-ha's eggs in it," says the farmer's wife, listening at the foot of the garret-stairs. "That girl is not worth her keep." The girl has another gala-day with the boys if the bees swarm in May: that brings a mild jollity to the house, because
A swarm of bees in May
Is worth a load of hay;
In June
Is worth a silver spoon;
In July
It ain't worth a fly.
She thinks it is fun to see the bees make a rush at the hired man blundering about in the way, and when he throws his hat at them, thinking to fool them, and sets to whipping his own ears, and the wise creatures settle in his hair, and the boys madly whisk hay in the air for his salvation, she "laughs like ten christenings."