r tricks of housework, to say nothing of an elementary knowledge
of English, which they usually acquire in a month; and we pay this kind
a couple of dollars a week, and they wash the clothes, take care of the
furnace, and mow the lawn with great pleasure. They usually stay a year
or so and then they go to Mrs. Singer's finishing school. They do not go
because they are discontented, but because she offers them five dollars
a week, which is a pretty fair-sized chunk of the earth to a young
Swedish girl just learning to do a few loops and spirals in English and
saving up the steamer fare to bring her sister over.

Mrs. Singer takes our nice, green, young hired girls, who are willing to
do anything up to the capacity of a stout back, and she tries to make
servants out of them. She gives them embroidered aprons and caps and
makes them keep house her way. And after they have spent a couple of
months making coffee to suit Mrs. Singer, and going over the mahogany to
suit Mrs. Singer, and arranging the magazines on the table to suit Mrs.
Singer, and taking up the breakfast to Miss Sally to suit Mrs. Singer,
and going over the back hall again to suit Mrs. Singer, and keeping
their mouths closed tightly all day to suit Mrs. Singer, and only going
out on Thursday afternoons to suit Mrs. Singer, they sort of get tired
of the job, and one after another they stop Mrs. Singer at a favorable
moment and say these fatal words:

"Aye gass aye ent stay eny longer."

Then some Homeburg family joyfully seizes on the deserter, and Mrs.
Singer starts out all over again on the job of making a servant out of a
hired girl.

I have to admire the woman for her eternal grit. She won't give up for
a minute. She is going to run her house just so if she has to train up
a million girls and lose them all. Half the time she has to do her own
work, but I'll bet that when she has the luncheon ready she puts her
little white lace napkin on her hair and comes in and announces it to
herself in the proper style; and I'll bet, too, that she doesn't talk to
herself while she is working in the kitchen, either. She says the way
Homeburg women talk to their servants is disgraceful; that it lowers a
servant's respect for her mistress. I'd give a lot to see Mrs. Singer
looking at herself coldly in the glass after breakfast and giving
herself orders for the day in a tone that would brook no familiarity
whatever.

Our women-folks, who are familiar with the Singer re