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466 shown by the fact that girls have come crying to their mistresses, begging to be sent home again because they cannot help eating all the good things in the pantry. It makes them feel ill and wicked; but they cannot help it. They want to go back to stir-about, or bacon and potatoes.

This, however, is an evil which may be considered voluntary, and is undeniably avoidable. The inevitable dangers to health are the constant unsettledness in the kitchen, the hurry and bustle, the rarity of relief, and, usually, the deficiency of sleep.

Miss Nightingale says, in her “Notes on Nursing” (p. 29): “I have never known persons who exposed themselves for years to constant interruption who did not muddle away their intellects by it at last.” Nothing can be truer than this: and no persons are more hopeless, both as to intellect and nerve, than those who cannot sit still, cannot bear to be alone, cannot stick to the same occupation for as many hours or half-hours as it may require. Something worse than this is what the maid-of-all-work has to put up with every day, and all day long, in a bustling place.

She can do nothing well: and she is aware that she does nothing well. She has neither the time nor the liberty of mind to take pleasure in any one occupation, and learn to excel in it. How can she cook a dinner properly when she has to leave her fire to make the beds, or to sweep the chambers, and to answer the door and the parlour bell? Every knock must be answered by her; every message must go through her; at the moment when her pudding, or her joint, or her sauce is in need of her mind and her hand, she is called off to admit visitors, or to receive orders, if not to be found fault with for not being about some other work. And thus it is from morning till night. She is rung up in the morning, heavy with sleep, for she is up late almost every night; and it is one continued hurry to get the water boiled, the rooms dusted, the breakfast laid, the shoes cleaned, &c., before the family come down; to say nothing of the sweeping of the hall and the cleaning of the door-steps. In a lodging-house, where there are three or four breakfasts in as many sitting-rooms, the case seems desperate—but I have seen the work done. There is but one dinner in such cases, as gentlemen dine anywhere rather than at their lodgings in our days of degenerate domestic cookery: but, still, the maid’s day is one full-drive throughout. She cooks badly; she waits badly; she cleans badly, and is aware that under her everything gets dirty. She grows untidy in her own person. Her clothes give way, and she has no time, and too probably no skill, to mend them. Her hair is rough and dusty from her perpetual whisking about the house and the area. Her face and hands are hot and smutty, and her apron soiled all over. I have known such a servant try hard to preserve the habit of whipping on a clean cap and apron when visitors came to the door, and being even paid to do this, and yet who could not keep it up. Besides the disheartening loss of comfort and self-respect under the encroachment of untidy habits, and the sense of growing confusion in the mind, there is the dread of the future. She is losing the power of learning to do things well. She can never raise herself, for there is no superior place which she is, or can become, qualified to fill. Her wages are small, because domestic service is paid by quality rather than quantity. She cannot lay by any considerable portion of her wages, because she wears out her clothes fast, and has to pay for the making and mending of them. She cannot for ever support such a life as she is leading, and she sees nothing hopeful outside of it.

The gravest single item of mischief in such a life is probably the deficiency of sleep. There are all kinds of employers of domestic servants in the world, as of other orders of persons; and many are thoroughly considerate about the health of their servants; but it does sometimes astonish an observer to see masters and mistresses who never bestow a thought on whether their domestics get sleep enough. There are families as well as lodging-houses where some member has as strong a passion for getting up early as another for sitting up late, while each expects to be waited on by the same servant. I have known gentlemen in lodgings who never could remember to take the key, when going to hear a critical debate which would last half the night. I have known a lodging-house servant who got to bed anywhere between midnight and four in the morning, when at all; but, as one lodger must have his breakfast at seven, she occasionally spared herself the worry of going to bed only to get up again before she could compose her harassed nerves to sleep. What must be the consequences of such a mode of life as this?

The poor thing conceals as long as possible that there is anything the matter with her. In the very worst cases of the ill-ordered family or lodging-house, or the establishments connected with great shops, there is often a good deal of money earned. Lodgers, shopmen, guests, make presents to the servant. This is the inducement to stay in such a purgatory, when the servant has any reason to believe she could obtain and keep an easier place; but of a really superior service she has no hope, and therefore she holds on to the last moment.

Where does she go to then? Sometimes to a hospital, sometimes to the country cottage, or to some brother or sister who can ill afford the burden of her sickness. Very often indeed she is taken to a lunatic asylum. A quarter of a century ago, we were told that the female wards of such asylums were filled mainly by servant-maids and governesses; and, above all, by maids-of-all-work; and now we are told the same thing still. Physicians account for it in various ways; some speak chiefly of morbid religion; some of love; some of overwork and too little sleep; some of the privation of home affections; and many others of the anxiety caused by a hopeless future. Whatever may be the proportion among all these causes of insanity, the insanity itself is a plain and undisputed fact. And it does not stand alone. It points to an excess of mortality in the same class. For persons who become insane from specified causes, there are always many more who die.

Are these deaths needless?