ir rooms are the neglected, ill-furnished, incommodious
ones,--and the kitchen is the most cheerless and comfortless place in
the house. Other families, more good-natured and liberal, provide
their domestics with more suitable accommodations, and are more
indulgent; but there is still a latent spirit of something like
contempt for the position. That they treat their servants with so much
consideration seems to them a merit entitling them to the most
prostrate gratitude; and they are constantly disappointed and shocked
at that want of sense of inferiority on the part of these people which
leads them to appropriate pleasant rooms, good furniture, and good
living as mere matters of common justice.

It seems to be a constant surprise to some employers that servants
should insist on having the same human wants as themselves. Ladies who
yawn in their elegantly furnished parlors, among books and pictures,
if they have not company, parties, or opera to diversify the evening,
seem astonished and half indignant that cook and chambermaid are more
disposed to go out for an evening gossip than to sit on hard chairs in
the kitchen where they have been toiling all day. The pretty
chambermaid's anxieties about her dress, the time she spends at her
small and not very clear mirror, are sneeringly noticed by those whose
toilet-cares take up serious hours; and the question has never
apparently occurred to them why a serving-maid should not want to look
pretty as well as her mistress. She is a woman as well as they, with
all a woman's wants and weaknesses; and her dress is as much to her as
theirs to them.

A vast deal of trouble among servants arises from impertinent
interferences and petty tyrannical exactions on the part of employers.
Now the authority of the master and mistress of a house in regard to
their domestics extends simply to the things they have contracted to
do and the hours during which they have contracted to serve; otherwise
than this, they have no more right to interfere with them in the
disposal of their time than with any mechanic whom they employ. They
have, indeed, a right to regulate the hours of their own household,
and servants can choose between conformity to these hours and the loss
of their situation; but, within reasonable limits, their right to come
and go at their own discretion, in their own time, should be
unquestioned.

If employers are troubled by the fondness of their servants for
dancing, evening co