of leaping out of your fingers, which must be felt to be believed.
After my first week in my kitchen I used to wonder, not at the
breakages, but at anything remaining unbroken.

My maids had a very ingenious method of disposing of the fragments
of their pottery misfortunes. At the back of the house an open
patch of ground, thickly covered with an under-growth of native
grass, and the usual large proportion of sheltering tussocks
stretched away to the foot of the nearest hill. This was burned
every second year or so, and when the fire had passed away the sight
it revealed was certainly very curious. Beneath each tussock had
lain concealed a small heap of broken china, which must have been
placed there in the dead of the night. The delinquents had
evidently been at the pains to perfect their work of destruction by
reducing the china articles in question, to the smallest imaginable
fragments, for fear of a protruding corner betraying the clever
_cache_; and the contrast afforded to the blackened ground on which
they lay, by the gay patches of tiny fragments huddled together, was
droll indeed. That was the moment for recognising the remains of a
favourite jug or plate, or even a beloved tea-cup. There they were
all laid in neat little heaps, and the best of it was that the
existing cook always declared loudly her astonishment at the base
ingenuity of such conduct, although I could not fail to recognise
many a plate or dish which had disappeared from the land of the
living during her reign.

All housekeepers will sympathise with my feelings at seeing an
amateur scullion, who had distinguished himself greatly in the
Balaklava charge, but who appeared to have no idea that boiling
water would scald his fingers,--drop the top plate of a pile which