English servants in nowise resemble the servants of other countries. The status of everyone of them is definitely fixed; I feel sure it appears somewhere in that unwritten constitution of England about which one hears and reads so much. They seem to be a class apart, a caste. Their outlines are defined with the most absolute exactitude. They never merge or melt or even temporarily fade into other and different outlines. They are what they are, and they know it and accept it. About them has grown up a conventional manner of treating them, of thinking about them, and alluding to them. It isn’t exactly a cruel manner. It is the manner to which I have referred; one from which every personal, sympathetic, genial quality has been carefully eliminated; one in which the necessary words are reduced to their simplest, most direct and unadorned minimum. “Good” English servants not only do not mind this, they are used to it and expect it. The part they play in life includes being verbally kicked for so much a year. It is because of the greater prevalence in the East of English butlers and footmen, I am sometimes inclined to believe, that one more often hears the “correct” tone in speaking to a servant in New York and Boston, than one does in the cities of the West. But there are other ways of making servants “know their place” of which we in the West are by no means guiltless. One woman of my acquaintance invariably refuses to engage a maid who possesses that all but indispensable appurtenance known as a “gentleman friend.” Another, for some cryptic reason, never allows a servant to take a trunk upstairs. All trunks must be unpacked and repacked downstairs. I don’t know why; neither do they. It is merely one of her edicts, and it has contributed not a little to the local “servant problem.”