To consider only the servile portion of the establishment: the Butler has his own dignity, and the various other males--upon whose titles I am a little shaky--have theirs. So the Females of the species: the Cook cooks; the Kitchen Attendants attend the kitchen; the Nurse nurses. So with the external squad: the Groom grooms; the Gardener and all his Assistants garden. With regularity and zeal the Footmen footle. The mere Maids go maidenly about their tasks. Below these specialised functionaries, for which Our Race is famous, comes one who may be regarded indifferently as the foundation of the fabric or the last rung of the ladder, and who is known as the Boy. On him the petty, unorganised, lesser work devolves, for which his Superiors are indeed responsible, but the mere brute labour of which is his alone. [Illustration: _The Boy Ethelbert in Captivity._] Thus it is the Boy who blacks the boots, fills all the coal scuttles and carries them about, lays the fires and lights them, polishes the knives, the silver plate--the silver itself, when there is any--and the antique pewter; washes up the dishes of the supper below stairs, cleans the door knobs and bell handles; pulls up the blinds; pulls back the curtains of the ground floor. Notably it is he also who conveys to the Upper Servants--who then shall have risen from slumber--the numbers of the bells that have sounded. It is he who opens the windows when they should be shut, and shuts them when they should be open--so far at least as the early hours are concerned, for when the Great are about this function is performed by a young man in uniform. It is the Boy who lays out the morning post, sets the newspapers in order--therein discovering the odds--lets out the little dog--or dogs--and after some few other trifling tasks accomplished, brushes and carefully folds the clothes of the male guests and lays them out where stronger and older men shall carry them up, each parcel to its room, and for that service receive an ultimate reward. It is the Boy who carries up the boots themselves--for these are defiling to the fingers!--and it is the Boy--mark you: this is essential to the tale, you must not miss it--_it is the Boy who picks up the rugs and shakes them_, room after room, a ritual preparatory to the settling of great clouds of dust, which, shortly after, not the Boy but a Maid brings down to the rugs again with feathery instruments and devastating cloths. Hence it was that the Boy--Ethelbert by his full baptismal name, but in the daily, Bert--before yet the wintry dawn was more than grey on that Saturday in January, whistling gaily at his task, was holding the polar bear up by its _forepaws_ and shaking it, as in duty bound. His heart was gay, for he was redeemed. Not so long since, this same Ethelbert had (alas!) in company with youths of his own age and a little more, not yet free from the trammels of elementary education, purloined from a shop certain fruits: two bananas.