am apt to think of these things. It is curious to note that to-day that
down-trodden, organ-playing creature, the Church of England village
Schoolmaster, holds much the same position as the seventeenth century
parson. The doctor in Bladesover ranked below the vicar but above the
"vet," artists and summer visitors squeezed in above or below this point
according to their appearance and expenditure, and then in a carefully
arranged scale came the tenantry, the butler and housekeeper, the
village shopkeeper, the head keeper, the cook, the publican, the second
keeper, the blacksmith (whose status was complicated by his daughter
keeping the post-office--and a fine hash she used to make of telegrams
too!) the village shopkeeper's eldest son, the first footman, younger
sons of the village shopkeeper, his first assistant, and so forth.

All these conceptions and applications of a universal precedence and
much else I drank in at Bladesover, as I listened to the talk of valets,
ladies'-maids, Rabbits the butler and my mother in the much-cupboarded,
white-painted, chintz-brightened housekeeper's room where the upper
servants assembled, or of footmen and Rabbits and estate men of all
sorts among the green baize and Windsor chairs of the pantry--where
Rabbits, being above the law, sold beer without a license or any
compunction--or of housemaids and still-room maids in the bleak,
matting-carpeted still-room or of the cook and her kitchen maids and
casual friends among the bright copper and hot glow of the kitchens.

Of course their own ranks and places came by implication to these
people, and it was with the ranks and places of the Olympians that the
talk mainly concerned itself. There was an old peerage and a Crockford
together with the books of recipes, the Whitaker's Almanack, the Old
Moore's Almanack, and the eighteenth century dictionary, on the little
dresser that broke the cupboards on one side of my mother's room; there