Now, how many times, through all these eventful years, difficult and trying circumstances must have occurred: long illness, perhaps; quarrelsome children to contend with; great changes in the household management; and so forth? A modern servant would have said, many times over, “Well, I can’t stand this; I must be off, and try for something easier.” “If people will get into such messes, they must get out of them.” “It is no business of mine: all I have to do is to take care of myself;” and off she would have gone. After repeating this many times, is it any wonder that, instead of finding a home in the house of a master’s favourite son, and attended to her grave by a weeping family, she finds herself an outcast in the world, and understands the true and bitter meaning of what, in the heyday of her health and strength, she used boastingly to sing— “I care for nobody, no, not I, And nobody cares for me?” “But now, ma’am,” said one of the women, “I don’t think it’s fair to speak of places as if they could be always stopped in. I have had my daughter ill at home for months. She was expected to be on her legs from seven o’clock in the morning till twelve at night, and only two hours out every other Sunday: she had to sleep in a room beside the kitchen, so that she never changed the air hardly; and she got so ill, that I am sometimes afeard she’ll never get well again.” “And, ma’am,” said another, “some missuses is so mean, they wouldn’t like anybody like you to know; so that you might go to a house many times, and never find it out: but they stints the poor servants in their food and their rest, and seems to be always a-thinking how much they can get out of ’em, and how little they can give ’em. I’m sure I know people about here that ain’t fit to take care of a dog.” Several others spoke to the same effect. At last I said, “I should, indeed, be sorry for you to suppose that I think it is entirely the fault of servants that we are doing so badly in this way at the present time. So far from it, I think mistresses are quite as much to blame as servants. But it would not be a wise thing for us to spend the little time we have together here in talking about what we cannot help. “Mistresses tell me, that it is the bad servants that put them out; and you tell me it is the bad mistresses that put you out. The sooner both parties begin to make some alteration the better. But as I am the only mistress here to-night, it is only waste of time talking about mistresses. And I want to ask you, first, if you do not think _you_ have something in _your_ power? Is there nothing _you_ can do to make things better than they are now?”