an usual. She turned out to be
very good natured, perfectly ignorant though willing to learn, and was
much admired by the neighbouring _cockatoos_, or small farmers. Lois the
housemaid, was the smallest and skimpiest and most angular girl I ever
beheld. At first I regarded her with deep compassion, imagining that
she was about fifteen years of age, and had been cruelly ill-treated and
starved. How she divined what was passing in my mind I cannot tell, but
during our first interview she suddenly fired up, and informed me
that she was twenty-two years old, that she was the seventh child of
a seventh child, and therefore absolutely certain to achieve some
wonderful piece of good luck; and furthermore, that she had been much
admired in her own part of the country, and was universally allowed to
be "the flower of the province." This statement, delivered with great
volubility and defiant jerkiness of manner, rather took my breath away;
but it was a case of "Hobson's choice" just then about servants, and as
I was assured she was a respectable girl, I closed with her terms (25
pounds a year and all found) on the spot. The fat pale cook was to get
35 pounds. Now-a-days I hear that wages are somewhat lower, but the
sums I have named were the average figures of six or seven years ago,
especially "up-country."

Here I feel impelled to repeat the substance of what I have stated
elsewhere,--that these rough, queer servants were, as a general rule,
perfectly honest, and of irreproachable morals, besides working,
in their own curious fashion, desperately hard. Our family was an
exceptionally small one, and the "place" was considered "light, you
bet," but even then it seemed to me as if both my domestics worked very
hard. In the first place there was the washing; two days severe work,
under difficulties which they thought nothing of. All the clothes had to
be taken to a boiler fixed in the side of a hill, for the convenience of
the creek, and washed and rinsed under a blazing sun (for of course it
never was attempted on a wet day) and amid clouds of sand-flies. Not
until evening was this really hard day's work over, and the various
garments fluttering in the breeze up a valley behind the house. The
chances were strongly in favour of a tremendous nor'-wester coming down
this said valley during the night, and in that case there would not be a
sign next morning of any of the clothes. Heavy things, such as sheets or
table cloths, might be s