was more, she was a treasure that knew
her own worth. Grace knew very well how she had been beset with
applications and offers of higher wages to draw her to various hotels
and boarding-houses in the vicinity, but had preferred the comparative
dignity and tranquillity of a private gentleman's family.

But the family had been small, orderly, and systematic, and Grace the
most considerate of housekeepers. Still it was not to be denied, that,
though an indulgent and considerate mistress, Bridget was, in fact,
mistress of the Seymour mansion, and that her mind and will concerning
the washing must be made known to the young queen.

It was a sore trial to speak to Lillie; but it would be sorer to be
left at once desolate in the kitchen department, and exposed to the
marauding inroads of unskilled Hibernians.

In the most delicate way, Grace made Lillie acquainted with the
domestic crisis; as, in old times, a prime minister might have carried
to one of the Charleses the remonstrance and protest of the House of
Commons.

"Oh! I'm sure I don't know how it's to be done," said Lillie, gayly.
"Mamma always got my things done _somehow_. They always _were_ done,
and always must be: you just tell her so. I think it's always best to
be decided with servants. Face 'em down in the beginning."

"But you see, Lillie dear, it's almost impossible to _get_ servants
at all in Springdale; and such servants as ours everybody says are an
exception. If we talk to Bridget in that way, she'll just go off and
leave us; and then what shall we do?"

"What in the world does John want to live in such a place for?" said
Lillie, peevishly. "There are plenty of servants to be got in New
York; and that's the only place fit to live in. Well, it's no affair
of mine! Tell John he married me, and must take care of me. He must
settle it some way: I shan't trouble my head about it."

The idea of living in New York, and uprooting the old time-honored
establishment in Springdale, struck Grace as a sort of sacrilege;
yet she could not help feeling, with a kind of fear, that the young
mistress had power to do it.

"Don't, darling, talk so, for pity's sake," she said. "I will go to
John, and we will arrange it somehow."

A long consultation with faithful John, in the evening, revealed to
him the perplexing nature of the material processes necessary to get
up his fair puff of thistledown in all that wonderful whiteness and
fancifulness of costume which had s