But the servants are on the whole good-natured, thoughtless, and careless of the morrow. They are satisfied if they are well fed; they are merry and grow fat. It is comparatively rare to find a black sheep among them. Such a woman usually commits petty thefts; she dares not steal anything of value, for if she takes it to the pawnbroker, she is sure to be discovered as he is completely under the surveillance of the police who can look over the pawn-accounts and seize any article that they may suspect to have been purloined. The woman may take the stolen article to an accomplice; but sooner or later, it finds its way to the pawnbroker’s, or if it is an article of clothing, to the second-hand clothes-dealer’s, who is similarly under police control, and so the crime is discovered. She steals most commonly stray coins, or handfuls of rice or other food which can be pilfered without much risk of detection. A woman whose mother or husband is in needy circumstances and comes often to call her out on mysterious business is most likely to be guilty of such dishonest practices. Servants are recruited from various quarters. They may be daughters of poor artisans or tradesmen in Tokyo, of peasants in the country, or of fishermen on the coasts. They naturally come, many of them, to ease the straitened means of their families and to save up enough to buy clothes to take with them when they marry. Others come from the country to see the town and learn its manners, which they do effectually, though perhaps not exactly according to their original intention. Such girls are of the better class of peasants; for the majority of peasants are kept pretty busy with the cultivation of their rice-paddies, and in spring-time whole families are engaged knee-deep in mud in planting rice, while they are equally busy at harvest-time, so that a girl at home does enough work to pay for her maintenance. It is therefore more often the girl’s ambition to see Tokyo and save up something than family necessity that prompts the country lass to seek service. Girls living in Tokyo are in a different position. Here girls in a large family can do little to earn their keep by helping their mother, unless they are engaged in some house-industry which calls for the whole energy of the family. If they have a small shop or an eating-house, one or at most two may be useful at home; while among artisans and labourers an extra girl means only one mouth more to feed, and accordingly she is sent out to service. But even in Tokyo it is not always poverty that supplies the vast army of domestic servants. It may be irksomeness on the girl’s part of parental authority which is not unfrequently exercised with severity, or fear on the parents’ part that the child would be spoilt under their roof and rendered unfit to bear the trials and hardships which must press on the poor man’s wife with a troop of children at her heels. In the latter case she is sent out among strangers to be