nguage.
You make a call upon a Japanese household, and the servant who admits
you will expect to exchange the formal salutations with you. When you
are ushered into the reception-room, should the lady of the house be
absent, the head servants will not only serve you with tea and
refreshments and offer you hospitalities in their mistress's name, but
may, if no one else be there, sit with you in the parlor, entertaining
you with conversation until the return of the hostess. The servants of
the household are by no means ignored socially, as they are with us, but
are always recognized and saluted by visitors as they pass into and out
of the room, and are free to join in the conversation of their betters,
should they see any place where it is possible that they may shed light
on the subject discussed. But though given this liberty of speech,
treated with much consideration, and having sometimes much
responsibility, servants do not forget their places in the household,
and do not seem to be bold or out of place. Indeed, the manners of some
of them would seem, to any one but a Japanese, to denote a lack of
proper self-respect,--an excess of humility, or an affectation of it.

In explaining to my scholars, who were reading "Little Lord Fauntleroy"
in English, a passage where a footman is spoken of as having nearly
disgraced himself by laughing at some quaint saying of the young lord,
my little peeresses were amazed beyond measure to learn that in Europe
and America a servant is expected never to show any interest in, or
knowledge of, the conversation of his betters, never to speak unless
addressed, and never to smile under any circumstances. Doubtless, in
their shrewd little brains, they formed their opinion of a civilization
imposing such barbarous restraints upon one class of persons.

The women servants in a family are in position more like the
self-respecting, old-fashioned New England "help" than they are like the
modern "girl." They do not work all day while the mistress sits in the
parlor doing nothing, and then, when their day's work is done, go out,
anxious to forget, in the society of their friends, the drudgery which
only the necessity for self-support and the high wages to be earned
render tolerable. As has been explained in a previous chapter, the
mistress of the house--be she princess or peasant--is herself the head
servant, and only gives up to her helpers the part of the labor which
she has not the time or stre