Page:Three Years in Europe.djvu/139

Rh During my previous sojourn in London I lived as a student, sometimes in lodging houses and for sometime in a boarding house. The landlady of a boarding or a lodging house engages the house from the owner, engages cook and servants, and looks after the food and the cooking, and the lodger therefore has no bother whatever except paying weekly for his room and attendance and food.

As I was going to live in London now for some months with my wife and children, I thought it would be more comfortable if we took lease of a house, engaged our own servants and ordered our own food. Families taking a house for years, generally take it unfurnished, and buy their own furniture,—but as our stay was to be only for some months, we took a furnished house. We looked at the advertisements in the papers, consulted some house-agents, and saw a large number of furnished houses before we finally made up our mind. At last we did make a selection, took lease of the house for three months, and early in June we removed to our new quarters, not far from the Kensington Gardens, where our children could often go of an afternoon to run about and play.

So far so good. But our work was not half done yet. Of houses there are plenty in London,—to get proper servants is the great difficulty. The education of the lower classes, and the opening up of new industries have unsettled the old relations between masters and servants all over the world. In India, Hindu matrons complain that it is daily becoming more difficult to get proper female servants who will do their work obediently and cheerfully, and English ladies complain bitterly of the laziness and