Now let us take the ideal kitchen, the kitchen as made and designed by Mr. G. Faulkner Armitage, of Stamford House, Altrincham, Cheshire, who has most kindly drawn for me the different pieces of furniture with which he decorates this charming room of his, and which, in the Manchester Exhibition, were stained green and decorated with brass hinges and locks, and see how we could adapt this to our present style of house, the house with the tiny kitchen, the smaller laundry, pantry, and scullery, and where there is not an atom of sitting-room apart from where all the work is going forward. In that case is it worth while to make a pretty room, and if we do can it be possibly kept so? I think it can, even with our present maids, whose taste for the beautiful is not largely developed; it most certainly could if we are given the maid of the future, the real lady-maid, who may come forward to the rescue of those unhappy beings who at present haunt the precincts of registry offices and spend small fortunes on advertisements which can have only the most barren results. But before I go on to speak of the ideal kitchen and the cook of the future; who will hardly concern my readers, as she is not born at present, or if she be is certainly not ready for engagement, I should like to say a few words about the best manner to obtain servants, repeating continually that if we require good ones we must take them ourselves and train them ourselves. I am always met, when I state this fact, by the unanswerable argument, ‘I have neither time nor patience to teach my servants; I can pay good wages. I want to engage skilled labour.’ Skilled labour may be had for money, there is no doubt, but the person who engages her maids on these lines will never have good or affectionate servants. She will be waited on, dressed, cooked for admirably, no doubt, but she will obtain nothing beyond her mere bargain. For better wages, a more aristocratic place, her cook will leave her in the lurch, despite the fact that she may expect to be laid up or to have most particular and important visitors at the very period when the old maid departs and the new one comes in. Her nurse will extract her pound of flesh in the shape of holidays and outings, whether the baby is teething or not, or whether the children are all miserable with colds, or she herself long to lie down with a bad headache. The housemaid will go to her ‘church or chapel,’ to her promenade with her ever-changing young man, whether she has unexpected guests or not; and she will never know the extreme bliss and comfort of possessing friends in the kitchen, who give up their own holidays because they are sure their mistress is not fit to be left, who regard the children as if they were as much theirs as they are the mistress’s, and who finally think of her and hers, and her comfort, as she does herself. No mere hired help will do all this. You must have maidens whom you have carefully trained;