“My poor girl, why did you not tell me at first?” she asked gently. “Oh! why should I?” was the reply. “You were all so happy and you could not bring the dead back.” “I could have sympathized with you, and given you a few days’ rest,” the Signora said. “I would not have allowed you to work.” “It was better for me to work,” the girl replied, wiping her eyes. “I should only have cried and worried the more, if I had been idle.” There seemed nothing that could be done. That class of poor do not adorn the resting-places of their dead, or the Signora would have paid the cost; they do not wear mourning, or, again, she would have paid for it; and this girl had no family to visit and mourn with. In her brother she had lost all. The only service possible—and that she accepted gratefully—was to have Masses said for the dead. That settled, the Signora dismissed her to her work again, and shut herself into her chamber, but not to sleep. “O the unconscious, pathetic heroism of the suffering poor!” she thought. “Where in the world have I a friend who would cover such a grief with smiles rather than disturb my pleasure? Where in the world does one see such patience under pain and hardship as is shown by the poor? They sigh, but they seldom cry out in rebellion. They accept the cross as their birthright, and both they and we grow to think that it does not hurt them as it would hurt us. How clearly it comes upon me now and then, why our Lord lived and sympathized with the poor, and why he said it would be so hard for the rich to enter heaven!” She was looking so serious and unrefreshed when the family gathered again that they at once inquired the cause, and she told them. “I feel as though I must have been lacking in some way,” she concluded, “or a servant who has been with me so long, and who has no nearer friend in the world than I am, would have come to me at once with her troubles. If the relations between servants and employers are what they should be, the servants should go to the master or mistress with all their joys and sorrows, just as children go to their parents. I have been thinking that there is one reason why, the world over, people are complaining of their servants. They have contented themselves with simply paying their wages and exacting their labor. There has been no sympathy. The association has been simply like that of fish and fowl, instead of that of the same creatures in different circumstances.” “I have always thought that in America,” Mr. Vane said. “There is not a country in the world, probably, where families have been, as a rule, more disagreeable toward their servants, and servants so troublesome, in consequence, to their employers. But I believe it is very seldom that a good mistress or master does not make a good servant, so far as the will goes.”