o a little family and tried general housework, and
the mistress taught me a great deal, and was good and kind, only there
the kitchen was a dark little place and my room like it, and I hadn't an
hour in anything that was pleasant and warm. A mistress might see, you'd
think, when a girl was quiet and fond of her home, and treat her
different from the kind that destroy everything; but I suppose the truth
is, they're worn out with that kind and don't make any difference. It's
hard to give up your whole life to somebody else's orders, and always
feel as if you was looked at over a wall like; but so it is, and you
won't get girls to try it, till somehow or other things are different."

Last on the record came a young woman born in Pennsylvania in a fairly
well-to-do farmer's house.

"I like house-work," she said. "There's nothing suits me so well. We
girls never had any money, nor mother either, and so I went into a
water-cure near the Gap and stayed awhile. Now the man that run it
believed in all being one family. He called the girls helpers, and he
fixed things so't each one had some time to herself every day, and he
tried to teach 'em all sorts of things. The patients were cranky to wait
on, but you felt as if you was a human being, anyhow, and had a chance.
Well, I watched things, and I said it was discouraging, sure enough. I
tried to do a square day's work, but two-thirds of 'em there shirked
whenever they could; half did things and then lied to cover their
tracks. I was there nine months, and I learned better'n ever I knew
before how folks ought to live on this earth. And I said to myself the
fault wasn't so much in the girls that hadn't ever been taught; it was
in them that didn't know enough to teach 'em. A girl thought it was
rather pretty and independent, and showed she was somebody, to sling
dishes on the table, and never say 'ma'am' nor 'sir,' and dress up
afternoons and make believe they hadn't a responsibility on earth. They
hadn't sense enough to do anything first-rate, for nobody had ever put
any decent ambition into 'em. It isn't to do work well; it's to get
somehow to a place where there won't be any more work. So I say that
it's the way of living and thinking that's all wrong; and that as soon
as you get it ciphered out and plain before you that any woman, high or
low, is a mean sneak that doesn't do everything in the best way she can
possibly learn, and that doesn't try to help everybody to feel just so,