The servant is a slow,
inefficient, impudent Irish girl, who spends the greater part of four days
in doing the family washing, and makes the other servants uncomfortable
and cross.
If this were all; but this is not. Mrs.----, who writes to all her friends
boastingly of the cheap summer quarters that she has found, and who gains
by the village shop-keeper's scales a pound of flesh a week, habitually
finds fault with the food, with the mattresses, with the chairs, with the
rag-carpets, with every thing, in short, down to the dust and the flies,
for neither of which last the poor landlord could be legitimately held
responsible. This is not an exaggerated picture. Everybody who has boarded
in country places in the summer has known dozens of such women. Every
country landlord can produce dozens of such letters, and of letters still
more exacting and unreasonable.
The average city man or woman who goes to a country house to board, goes
expecting what it is in the nature of things impossible that they should
have. The man expects to have boots blacked and hot water ready, and a
bell to ring for both.
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