Project Gutenberg's Mistress and Maid, by Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)

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Title: Mistress and Maid

Author: Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)

Release Date: September 15, 2004 [EBook #13461]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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MISTRESS AND MAID. A Household Story.

BY

MISS MULOCH, AUTHOR OF
"JOHN HALIFAX, GENTLEMAN," "OLIVE," "THE OGILVIES,"
"THE HEAD OF THE FAMILY," "NOTHING NEW," "AGATHA'S HUSBAND," &c,, &c.

RICHMOND:
WEST & JOHNSTON, PUBLISHERS.
1864. Printed at the Lynchburg "Virginian" Book and Job Office.

MISTRESS AND MAID.

CHAPTER I.

She was a rather tall, awkward, and strongly-built girl of about
fifteen. This was the first impression the "maid" gave to her
"mistresses," the Misses Leaf, when she entered their kitchen,
accompanied by her mother, a widow and washer-woman, by name Mrs.
Hand. I must confess, when they saw the damsel, the ladies felt a
certain twinge of doubt as to whether they had not been rash in
offering to take her; whether it would not have been wiser to have
gone on in their old way--now, alas! grown into a very old way, so as
almost to make them forget they had ever had any other--and done
without a servant still.

Many consultations had the three sisters held before such a
revolutionary extravagance was determined on. But Miss Leaf was
beginning both to look and to feel "not so young as she had been;"
Miss Selina ditto; though, being still under forty, she would not
have acknowledged it for the world. And Miss Hilary young, bright,
and active as she was, could by no possibility do every thing that
was to be done in the little establishment: be, for instance, in
three places at once--in the school-room, teaching little boys and
girls, in the kitchen cooking dinner, and in the rooms up stairs busy
at house-maid's work. Besides, much of her time was spent in waiting
upon "poor Selina," who frequently was, or fancied her self, too ill
to take any part in either the school or house duties.

Though, the thing being inevitable, she said little about it, Miss
Leaf's he