Section 7. This marked a new stage in the family’s financial progress; and as usual it was signalized by a grand debauch in bill-paying. Also there was a real table-cover for Corydon, and a vase in which she might put spring-flowers; there were new dresses for the baby, and more important yet, a new addition to the house. This was to be a sort of lean-to at the rear, sixteen feet wide and eight feet deep, and divided into two apartments, one of which was to be the kitchen, and the other an extra bed-room. For they were going to keep a servant! This was a new decision, to which they had come after much hesitation and discussion. It would be a frightful expense--including the cost of the extra food it would add over thirty dollars a month to their expenses; but it was the only way they could see the least hope of freedom, of any respite from household drudgery. It had been just a year now since they had set out upon their adventure in domesticity; and in that time Corydon figured that she had prepared two thousand meals for the baby. She had fed each one of them, spoonful by spoonful, into his mouth; and also she had washed two thousand spoons and dishes, and brushed off two thousand tables, and swept two thousand floors. And with every day of such drudgery the heights of music and literature seemed further away and more unattainable. Thyrsis had seen something of servants in earlier days--he had memories of strange figures that during intervals of prosperity had flitted through his mother’s home. There had been the frail, anaemic Swedish woman, who lived on tea and sugar, and afterwards had gone away and borne nine children, more frail and anaemic than herself; there had been the stout personage with the Irish brogue who had dropped the Christmas turkey out of the window and had not taken the trouble to go down after it; there had been the little old negress who had gone insane, and hurled the salt-box at his mother’s head. But Thyrsis was hoping that they might avoid such troubles themselves; he had an idea that by watching at Castle Garden they might lay hold upon some young peasant-girl from Germany, who would be untouched by any of the corruptions of civilization. “A sort of Dorothea”, he suggested to Corydon; and they agreed that they would search diligently and find such a “_treffliches Mädchen_”, who would be trusting and affectionate, and would talk in German with the baby. So now he spent several days hunting in strange places; and at last, in a dingy East-side employment-office, he came upon his _Schatz_. She was buxom and hearty, and fairly oozed good-nature at every pore; she had only been a week in the country, and was evidently naïve enough for any purpose whatever. She had no golden hair like Dorothea, but was swarthy--her German was complicated with a Hungarian accent, and with strange words that one had not come upon in Goethe and Freitag, and could not find in any dictionary.