though willing to learn, and was much admired by the neighbouring
_cockatoos_, or small farmers. Lois the housemaid, was the smallest
and skimpiest and most angular girl I ever beheld. At first I
regarded her with deep compassion, imagining that she was about
fifteen years of age, and had been cruelly ill-treated and starved.
How she divined what was passing in my mind I cannot tell, but
during our first interview she suddenly fired up, and informed me
that she was twenty-two years old, that she was the seventh child of
a seventh child, and therefore absolutely certain to achieve some
wonderful piece of good luck; and furthermore, that she had been
much admired in her own part of the country, and was universally
allowed to be "the flower of the province." This statement,
delivered with great volubility and defiant jerkiness of manner,
rather took my breath away; but it was a case of "Hobson's choice"
just then about servants, and as I was assured she was a respectable
girl, I closed with her terms (25 pounds a year and all found) on
the spot. The fat pale cook was to get 35 pounds. Now-a-days I
hear that wages are somewhat lower, but the sums I have named were
the average figures of six or seven years ago, especially
"up-country."

Here I feel impelled to repeat the substance of what I have stated
elsewhere,--that these rough, queer servants were, as a general
rule, perfectly honest, and of irreproachable morals, besides
working, in their own curious fashion, desperately hard. Our family
was an exceptionally small one, and the "place" was considered
"light, you bet," but even then it seemed to me as if both my
domestics worked very hard. In the first place there was the
washing; two days severe work, under difficulties which they thought
nothing of. All the clothes had to be taken to a boiler fixed in