intelligence-office. In the different families where she has lived
she has been told a hundred times the proprieties of household
life, how to make beds, arrange rooms, wash china, glass, and
silver, and set tables; but her habitual rule is to try in each place
how small and how poor services will be accepted. When she finds
less will not do, she gives more. When the mistress follows her
constantly, and shows an energetic determination to be well served,
she shows that she can serve well; but the moment such attention
relaxes, she slides back again. She is as destructive to a house as
a fire; the very spirit of wastefulness is in her; she cracks the
china, dents the silver, stops the water-pipes with rubbish, and,
after she is gone, there is generally a sum equal to half her wages
to be expended in repairing the effects of her carelessness. And
yet there is one thing to be said for her: she is quite as careful of
her employer's things as of her own. The full amount of her mischiefs
often does not appear at once, as she is glib of tongue, adroit in
apologies, and lies with as much alertness and as little thought of
conscience as a blackbird chatters. It is difficult for people who
have been trained from childhood in the school of verities,--who
have been lectured for even the shadow of a prevarication, and shut
up in disgrace for a lie, till truth becomes a habit of their
souls,--it is very difficult for people so educated to understand how
to get on with those who never speak the truth except by mere
accident, who assert any and every thing that comes into their heads
with all the assurance and all the energy of perfect verity.

"What becomes of this girl? She finds means, by begging, borrowing,
living out, to keep herself extremely trim and airy for a certain
length of time, till the rats and waterfalls, the lace hat and
parasol, and the glib tongue, have done their work in making a fool of
some honest young mechanic who earns three dollars a day. She marries
him with no higher object than to have somebody to earn money for her
to spend. And what comes of such marriages?

"That is one ending of her career; the other is on the street, in
haunts of vice, in prison, in drunkenness, and death.

"Whence come these girls? They are as numerous as yellow butterflies
in autumn; they flutter up to cities from the country; they grow up
from mothers who ran the same sort of career before them; and the
reason why in the end th