The usual term for a valet to a man of estate was--his gentleman, and a lady's maid-servant was--her gentlewoman. The apostle commands, "By love serve one another," and our forefathers do not seem at one time to have thought that domestic service was derogatory to gentility; and I do not myself see how that any one who considers that his supreme Master and Lord humbled Himself, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and stooped to wash His disciples feet, can sneer at _menial_ service. Nothing is menial but what is done in a base, cantankerous, unloving spirit. It is usually found that such domestics as come out of the lowest slums are they who are most particular not to do anything that is not precisely their work, who are most choice and most exacting. When the relatives of the family ceased to be servants in the house, then came in the daughters of farmers, the cleanest, most thrifty, obliging, sensible, and altogether admirable domestics that ever were. Who that is over fifty does not remember them? They were conscientious, they took an interest in the family, their mistresses liked--even loved them. Then the farmers became too grand in their ideas to send out their girls into service, and consequently one class alone was drained of its young women, the labourer class, the uneducated, undisciplined, the class that had no idea of thrift; and is it to be wondered at that the girls' heads should be turned when they find in what demand they were? I do not mean to say that, taken as a whole, a more respectable, nice, honest, cleanly set of girls is anywhere to be found than our English serving lasses; but we live in an age of transition--they who were formerly only required as drudges in farm-houses, suddenly discover themselves in huge request, and that has upset them. The trouble there is in households now about domestic servants is said by some to be due to the mistresses--they do not make friends of their slavies, as did the ancient mistresses of theirs. But how can they, when the girl does not stay in the house over three months or half a year, and when she belongs to a class intellectually, socially, educationally removed from her mistress by a great cultural gulf as wide as that which separated Lazarus from Dives?