You will do good service at least in teaching any of these who will listen to you, that if they can once make up their minds to a fixed state of life, and a fixed income, and a fixed expenditure--if they can by any means get their servants to stay long enough with them to fit into their places and know the run of the furrows--then something like service and mastership, and fulfilment of understood and reciprocal duty, may become possible; no otherwise. I leave this matter to your better handling, and will trespass on your patience no more. Only, as I think you will get into some disgrace with your lady correspondents for your ungallant conclusions respecting them[96]--which I confess surprised me a little, though I might have been prepared for it if I had remembered what order the husband even of so good a housewife as Penelope was obliged to take with some of her female servants after prolonged absence,--I have translated a short passage of Xenophon's Economics[97] for you, which may make your peace if you will print it. I wish the whole book were well translated; meantime, your lady readers must be told that this is part of a Greek country gentleman's account of the conversation he had with his young wife (a girl of fifteen only), a little while after their marriage, when "she had got used to him," and was not frightened at being spoken gravely to. First they pray together; and then they have a long happy talk, of which this is the close: "But there is one of the duties belonging to you," I said, "which, perhaps will be more painful to you than any other, namely, the care of your servants when they are ill." "Nay," answered my wife, "that will be the most pleasing of all my duties to me, if only my servants will be grateful when I minister rightly to them, and will love me better." And I, pleased with her answer, said, "Indeed, lady, it is in some such way as this that the queen of the hive is so regarded by her bees, that, if she leave the hive, none will quit her, but all will follow her." Then she answered, "I should wonder if this office of leader were not yours rather than mine, for truly my care and distribution of things would be but a jest were it not for your inbringing." "Yes," I said, "but what a jest would my inbringing be if there were no one to take care of what I brought. Do not you know how those are pitied of whom it is fabled that they have always to pour water into a pierced vessel?" "Yes; and they _are_ unhappy, if in truth they do it," said she. "Then also," I said, "remember your other personal cares. Will all be sweet to you when, taking one of your maidens who knows not how to spin, you teach her, and make her twice the girl she was; or one who has no method nor habit of direction, and you teach her how to manage a house, and make her faithful and mistress-like and every way worthy, and when you have the power of benefiting those who are orderly and useful in the house, and of punishing any one who is