ed so as to damage the frescoes below, my wife, with great
delicacy and precaution, interrogated Kate as to whether she had
followed her instructions in the care of the water-pipes. Of course
she protested the most immaculate care and circumspection. 'Sure, and
she knew how careful one ought to be, and wasn't of the likes of thim
as wouldn't mind what throuble they made,--like Biddy, who would throw
trash and hair in the pipes, and niver listen to her tellin'; sure,
and hadn't she broken the pipes in the kitchen, and lost the stoppers,
as it was a shame to see in a Christian house?' Ann, the third girl,
being privately questioned, blamed Biddy on Monday, and Kate on
Tuesday; on Wednesday, however, she exonerated both; but on Thursday,
being in a high quarrel with both, she departed, accusing them
severally, not only of all the evil practices aforesaid, but of lying
and stealing, and all other miscellaneous wickednesses that came to
hand. Whereat the two thus accused rushed in, bewailing themselves and
cursing Ann in alternate strophes, averring that she had given the
baby laudanum, and, taking it out riding, had stopped for hours with
it in a filthy lane where the scarlet fever was said to be rife,--in
short, made so fearful a picture that Marianne gave up the child's
life at once, and has taken to her bed. I have endeavored all I could
to quiet her, by telling her that the scarlet fever story was probably
an extemporaneous work of fiction, got up to gratify the Hibernian
anger at Ann; and that it wasn't in the least worth while to believe
one thing more than another from the fact that any of the tribe said
it. But she refuses to be comforted, and is so Utopian as to lie there
crying, 'Oh, if I only could get one that I could trust,--one that
would really speak the truth to me,--one that I might know really went
where she said she went, and really did as she said she did!' To have
to live so, she says, and bring up little children with those she
can't trust out of her sight, whose word is good for nothing,--to feel
that her beautiful house and her lovely things are all going to rack
and ruin, and she can't take care of them, and can't see where or when
or how the mischief is done,--in short, the poor child talks as women
do who are violently attacked with housekeeping fever tending to
congestion of the brain. She actually yesterday told me that she
wished, on the whole, she never had got married, which I take to be
the m