inness, a perfect contrast to that of the
girls who had preceded her. It consisted of strong dark-blue stuff,
made perfectly plain to her figure, with a narrow band of white linen
around her throat. Her dark brown hair was brushed smoothly away from
her face, and confined simply behind in a net; there was not the
slightest pretension to coquetry in its arrangement; in fact, the
object seemed to be to get it snugly out of the way, rather than to
make it a matter of ornament. Nevertheless, I could not help remarking
that there was a good deal of it, and that it waved very prettily,
notwithstanding the care that had been taken to brush the curl out of
it.

She was apparently about twenty years of age. Her face was not
handsome, but it was a refined and intelligent one. The skin had a
sallow hue, which told of ill health or of misfortune; there were
lines of trouble about the eye; but the mouth and chin had that
unmistakable look of firmness which speaks a person able and resolved
to do a quiet battle with adverse fate, and to go through to the end
with whatever is needed to be done, without fretfulness and without
complaint. She had large, cool, gray eyes, attentive and thoughtful,
and she met the look of any one who addressed her with an honest
firmness; she seemed to be, in fact, simply and only interested to
know and to do the work she had undertaken,--but what there might be
behind and beyond that I could not conjecture.

One thing about her dress most in contrast with that of the other
servants was that she evidently wore no crinoline. The exuberance of
this article in the toilet of our domestics had become threatening of
late, apparently requiring that the kitchens and pantries should be
torn down and rebuilt. As matters were, our three girls never could
be in our kitchen at one time without reefings and manoeuvrings of
their apparel which much impeded any other labor, and caused some loss
of temper; and our china-closet was altogether too small for the
officials who had to wash the china there, and they were constantly at
odds with my mother for her firmness in resisting their tendency to
carry our china and silver to the general melee of the kitchen sink.
Moreover, our dining-room not having been constructed with an eye to
modern expansions of the female toilet, it happened that, if our table
was to be enlarged for guests, there arose serious questions of the
waiter's crinoline to complicate the calculations; and