To the eyes of an English housewife the title of this chapter must
appear a very bad joke indeed, and the amusement what the immortal
Mrs. Poyser would call "a poor tale." Far be it from me to make
light of the misery of a tolerably good servant coming to you after
three months' service, just as you were beginning to feel settled
and comfortable, and announcing with a smile that she was going to
be married; or, with a flood of tears, that she found it "lonesome."
Either of these two contingencies was pretty sure to arise at least
four times a year on a station.

At first I determined to do all I could to make their new home so
attractive to my two handmaidens that they would not wish to leave
it directly. In one of Wilkie Collins' books an upholsterer is
represented as saying that if you want to domesticate a woman, you
should surround her with bird's-eye maple and chintz. That must
have been exactly my idea, for the two rooms which I prepared for my
maidservants were small, indeed, yet exquisitely pretty. Of course
I should not have been so foolish as to buy any of the unnecessary
and dainty fittings with which they were decorated, but as all the
furniture and belongings of an English house, a good deal larger
than our station home, had been taken out to it, there were sundry
toilet tables, etc., whose destination would have been a loft over
the stable, if I had not used them for my maids.


I had seen and chosen two very respectable young women in
Christchurch, one as a cook, and the other as a housemaid. The
cook, Euphemia by name, was a tall, fat, flabby woman, with a pasty
complexion, but a nice expression of face, and better manners than
usual. She turned out to be very good natured, perfectly ignorant