Frankly, I like to talk to servants and always do when I feel conversationally inclined, and one of them is available. I extremely enjoy hearing what they have to say about their employment, their wages, their ambitions, the kind of treatment they receive from their employers and the characteristics of their employers. From servants I have learned many curious and amazing things about people I thought I knew tolerably well and really didn’t because I had never been their servant. And I am not in the least ashamed of having learned these things by chatting pleasantly with servants; I am glad of it, for it has added greatly to my understanding of people and life. Nothing is more interesting than the contemplation of our little world from as many different angles as possible. The servant’s angle is one of the most acute. From servants one learns how a striking variety of persons conduct themselves under almost all the circumstances to which human beings are subjected. It is, indeed, from them alone that one can find out about such matters; one’s personal experience, after all, is necessarily limited to so few intimate, human contacts and incidents. To talk frankly with intelligent servants is to receive a great light and to re-awaken the interest in one’s fellow-man that at times has a tendency to doze. Stewards on ocean steamers invariably repay one with reflections on the world in general for whatever time one spends with them. They see such an unending procession of human beings that, from the remarks of smoking-room stewards, I have felt that, for them, the individual has almost ceased to exist and is instinctively pigeonholed, as a type. They seem to be able to take a man’s measure at a glance, and they usually take it with astonishing accuracy. I don’t mean that their appraisal begins and ends with the probable amount of the gentleman’s tip; they are far from being as avaricious as they are supposed to be. They know whether he will be exigent or easy to please, whether he will have consideration for them, or keep them needlessly running back and forth from a half-consciousness that it is within his right, according to the manner in which the world is arranged, to do so. They know at once whether he will regard them as a mere machine, or a natural enemy, or a servant with several almost human attributes, or a human being who chances, for the time, to be acting in the capacity of one who serves. Those, broadly speaking, are the four ways in which servants are usually looked upon. Personally, I never can quite comprehend the point of view that does not see a servant in the fashion I have mentioned last. And yet, judging from remarks that are made to one by both women and men about their servants, and from the testimony of those engaged in this form of labor, this manner of appreciating the servant class does not seem to be a usual one.