Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 16.djvu/128

120 which good management your master will save some gallons in every hogshead.

This is the time, that in honour to your master you ought to show your kindness to your fellow-servants, and especially to the cook; for what signifies a few flagons out of a whole hogshead? But make them be drunk in your presence, for fear they should be given to other folks, and so your master be wronged: but advise them, if they get drunk, to go to bed, and leave word they are sick; which last caution I would have all the servants observe, both male and female.

If your master finds the hogshead to fall short of his expectation, what is plainer, than that the vessel leaked: that the wine-cooper had not filled it in proper time: that the merchant cheated him with a hogshead below the common measure?

When you are to get water on for tea after dinner (which in many families is part of your office) to save firing, and to make more haste, pour it into the teakettle from the pot where cabbage or fish have been boiling, which will make it much wholesomer, by curing the acid and corroding quality of the tea.

Be saving of your candles, and let those in the sconces of the hall, the stairs, and in the lantern, burn down into the sockets, until they go out of themselves; for which your master and lady will commend your thriftness, as soon as they shall smell the snuff.

If a gentleman leaves a snuffbox or picktoothcase on the table after dinner, and goes away, look upon it as part of your vails, for so it is allowed by servants,