As for herbs—Miss Priscilla Dobbin’s private opinion was, that “the deuce was in Mrs. Piggott about them.” For ever, so she told her mother, she was rubbing off those herbs into bottles, and tying them down; while, in respect of pickles, it is on record, the assistant made herself so frightfully ill with devouring those exhilarating articles of diet wholesale, that the cook assured her she should be sent home forthwith if she could not content herself for the future with cooler viands than chilies and chutnee. “Drat them girls!” exclaimed Mrs. Piggott; “they’re every one alike now—for crinolines, and vinegar, and piccalilly. I remember a young housemaid as used to come and see me when I was taking care of General Furdie’s house in Gloucester Place—I believe she used to live on pickles—bought them at the oilman’s, sixpenny-worth at a time, and if she came and sat with me for half an hour, she would finish the lot while she sat talking. Ah! girls ain’t like what they used to be.” “And a good job too that they bain’t,” retorted Priscilla, who was certainly as unlike one of Mrs. Piggott’s ideal maidens as can well be conceived. Except that she could “get through her work,” when she chose to devote herself to it, and that she was sufficiently “owdacious and comical” to make time pass fast in the Berrie Down kitchen, Priscilla Dobbin was not possessed, in Mrs. Piggott’s eyes, of a solitary virtue. She was not “one” the cook would ever have had about the house; but, of course, Mrs. Dudley knew best—a severely ironical expression, which meant that Mrs. Dudley knew nothing whatever about the matter; indeed, Mrs. Piggott had been heard to say, that “a baby in arms was as fit to choose a servant as her mistress.” After all, however, Priscilla was not exactly an importation of Mrs. Dudley’s. A girl had been wanted, and this girl, a protégée of Bessie’s, stepped at once from a wretched home to service at Berrie Down, where she worked harder, and idled more persistently, than any young person “of her inches,” that it had ever been Mrs. Piggott’s misfortune previously to come into contact with. And yet with all she was as good company, in her rank, as Bessie Ormson in a higher; better, perhaps, for she possessed artistic, histrionic, and imitative powers, of which the young lady was utterly destitute.