ng, and being flattered. If she takes any pleasure unconnected
with her office before the afternoon, it is when she runs up the
area-steps or to the door to hear and purchase a new song, or to see a
troop of soldiers go by; or when she happens to thrust her head out of
a chamber window at the same time with a servant at the next house,
when a dialogue infallibly ensues, stimulated by the imaginary
obstacles between. If the Maid-servant is wise, the best part of her
work is done by dinner-time; and nothing else is necessary to give
perfect zest to the meal. She tells us what she thinks of it, when she
calls it "a bit o' dinner." There is the same sort of eloquence in her
other phrase, "a cup o' tea;" but the old ones, and the washerwomen,
beat her at that. After tea in great houses, she goes with the other
servants to hot cockles, or What-are-my-thoughts-like, and tells Mr.
John to "have done then;" or if there is a ball given that night, they
throw open the doors, and make use of the music up stairs to dance by.
In smaller houses, she receives the visits of her aforesaid cousin;
and sits down alone, or with a fellow maid-servant, to work; talks of
her young master or mistress and Mr. Ivins (Evans); or else she calls
to mind her own friends in the country; where she thinks the cows and
"all that" beautiful, now she is away. Meanwhile, if she is lazy, she
snuffs the candle with her scissors; or if she has eaten more heartily
than usual, she sighs double the usual number of times, and thinks
that tender hearts were born to be unhappy.

Such being the Maid-servant's life in-doors, she scorns, when abroad,
to be anything but a creature of sheer enjoyment. The Maid-servant,
the sailor, and the schoolboy, are the three beings that enjoy a
holiday beyond all the rest of the world;--and all for the same
reason,--because their inexperience, peculiarity of life, and habit of
being with persons of circumstances or thoughts above them, give them
all, in their way, a cast of the romantic. The most active of the
money-getters is a vegetable compared with them. The Maid-servant when
she first goes to Vauxhall, thinks she is in heaven. A theatre is all
pleasure to her, whatever is going forward, whether the play or the
music, or the waiting which makes others impatient, or the munching of
apples and gingerbread, which she and her party commence almost as
soon as they have seated themselves. She prefers tragedy to comedy,
because it is g