Oh, dear, dear! Wonder if my mistress _ever_ thinks I am made of flesh and blood? Five times, within half an hour, I have trotted up stairs, to hand her things, that were only four feet from her rocking-chair. Then, there’s her son, Mr. George,--it does seem to me, that a great able-bodied man like him, needn’t call a poor tired woman up four pair of stairs to ask “what’s the time of day?” Heigho!--its “_Sally_ do this,” and “_Sally_ do that,” till I wish I never had been baptized at all; and I might as well go farther back, while I am about it, and wish I had never been born. Now, instead of ordering me round so like a dray horse, if they would only look up smiling-like, now and then; or ask me how my “rheumatiz” did; or say good morning, Sally; or show some sort of interest in a fellow-cretur, I could pluck up a bit of heart to work for them. A kind word would ease the wheels of my treadmill amazingly, and wouldn’t cost _them_ anything, either. Look at my clothes, all at sixes and sevens. I can’t get a minute to sew on a string or button, except at night; and then I’m so sleepy it is as much as ever I can find the way to bed; and what a bed it is, to be sure! Why, even the pigs are now and then allowed clean straw to sleep on; and as to bed-clothes, the less said about them the better; my old cloak serves for a blanket, and the sheets are as thin as a charity school soup. Well, well; one wouldn’t think it, to see all the fine glittering things down in the drawing-room. Master’s span of horses, and Miss Clara’s diamond ear-rings, and mistresses rich dresses. I _try_ to think it is all right, but it is no use. To-morrow is Sunday--“day of _rest_” I believe they _call_ it. H-u-m-p-h!--more cooking to be done--more company--more confusion than on any other day in the week. If I own a soul I have not heard how to take care of it for many a long day. Wonder if my master and mistress calculate to pay me for _that_, if I lose it? It is a _question_ in my mind. Land of Goshen! I aint sure I’ve got a mind--there’s the bell again! CRITICS. “Bilious wretches, who abuse you because you write better than they.” Slander and detraction! Even I, Fanny, know better than that. _I_ never knew an editor to nib his pen with a knife as sharp as his temper, and write a scathing criticism on a book, because the authoress had declined contributing to his paper. I never knew a man who had fitted himself to a promiscuous coat, cut out in merry mood by taper fingers, to seize his porcupine quill, under the agony of too tight a _self-inflicted_ fit, to annihilate the offender. I never saw the bottled-up hatred of years, concentrated in a single venomous paragraph. I never heard of an unsuccessful masculine author, whose books were drugs in the literary market, speak with a sneer of successful literary feminity, and insinuate that it was by _accident_, not _genius_, that they hit the popular favor!