of fun, and old Kink, the gardener, managed to get a great many vegetables
out of it, too, although not so many as Collins thought he ought to.

Collins was the cook, a fat, smiling, hot lady of about fifty, who had been
with Mrs. Avory ever since she married. Collins understood children
thoroughly, and made cakes that were rather wet underneath. Her Yorkshire
pudding (for Sunday's dinner) was famous, and her horse radish sauce was so
perfect that it brought tears to the eyes.

Collins collected picture postcards and adored the family. She had never
been cross to any of them, but her way with the butcher's boy and the
grocer's boy and the fishmonger's boy was terrible.

She snapped their heads off (so to speak) every morning, and old Kink spent
quite a lot of his time in rubbing from off the backdoor the awful things
they wrote about her in chalk.

The parlourmaid was Eliza Pollard, who had red hair and a kind heart, but
was continually falling out with her last young man and getting another.
She told Hester all about it. Hester had a special knack of being told
about the servants' young men, for she knew also all about those of Eliza
Pollard's predecessors.

The housemaid was Jane Masters, who helped Eliza Pollard to make the beds.
Jane Masters did not hold with fickleness in love--in fact, she couldn't
abide it--and therefore she was steadily true to a young man called 'Erb,
who looked after the lift at the Stores, and was a particular friend of
Gregory's in consequence. No man who had charge of a lift could fail to be
admired by Gregory.