Now occurs an opportunity to tell some of our “domestic help” experiences. We feared that our place would be too lonely for a Chinaman; the nearest Celestial within reach was at a ranch some five miles away, and though there was quite an active centre of Chinese life and light at the laundry gentleman’s shanty at the village of El Barco, still that was six miles away, and Chinamen are bad walkers, and few of them can drive. Also, their wages are very high, thirty dollars to thirty-five dollars a month being the lowest; some of them get as much as fifty dollars and sixty dollars a month. So we thought we would try our luck with a woman servant; we could talk our own language to her and lend her books, which would overcome, to some extent, the loneliness of the life for her, and we would only have to pay her twenty to twenty-five dollars a month.
Our first was an American girl; her manners were new to us, but not refreshing. We did not keep her long, for she proved to have something wrong with her heart, and could neither stoop nor carry any slight weight without turning blue in the face. The boys did not take to her. She would saunter into the dining-room when it was time to lay the cloth, and if I were not there, she would take up one of the papers on the table, and either stand very much at her ease reading it, or sit down to it, often at the same time using a toothpick. Or she would slap my sons on the shoulder, saying, “Now then, boys, clear out!”
I was not able to go into town this time, so I telegraphed to my friend at the agency office, a nice helpful Irishman, who always did his best for me.
Though the little village of El Barco has but a scattered population of about two hundred, they have had a telephone into San Miguel for many a year. So I sent a message asking for a servant of some kind at twenty-five dollars a month. In answer, my Irish friend asked, would I be willing to try a nigger, adding that he was not very black! He knew my feelings about the “gorilla.” When I heard further that he was a willing, pleasant-spoken fellow, with a very good character for honesty, I agreed to try him. So he was sent out by the evening train. We became quite fond of him, and though he knew very little about cooking, he was exceedingly quick at learning, and was very capable in other ways, and so obliging that much could be forgiven him. He had great pride in all he learnt, and liked to know the proper orthodox names of the different dishes, though he could never conquer the word rissole, but always called it “free soul!” He had left his wife and family in Tennessee, where he had formerly kept a dairy farm, but his health had failed, and he was threatened with lung trouble; so he came to this sunny climate, and hoped to be able to send for them to join him before very long.
As he could not read or write, I was his secretary, and had often great difficulty in keeping a grave face when reading his home letters. They were a jumble of revival meetings, the arrival of families of young pigs, names of different neighbours who had “got religion,” and advice as to how he was to make the bread for us, finishing up with “howdies” from everyone. It often took me quite a long time to puzzle them out. However we soon began to teach him to write and read, and he was so quick in learning that before he left us he was quite independent of my help in his correspondence. His worst drawback was the colour of his hands, which being a kind of neutral grey brown, never let him know clearly whether they were dirty or clean, and I soon found his finger marks on many treasures. However, such things are trifles in this life, and I should have kept him till this day, I believe, but that, in an evil moment, we again made the experiment of getting a woman servant from the old country.
The woman we had heard of was willing to pay her own passage out, for the sake of the £70 wage which she could never hope to get at home; so we engaged her and let our little nigger go.
(To be continued.)
