oots. She cleans
boots all over the house, at all hours of the day. She comes and
sits down on the hero's breakfast-table and cleans them over the poor
fellow's food. She comes into the drawing-room cleaning boots.

She has her own method of cleaning them, too. She rubs off the mud, puts
on the blacking, and polishes up all with the same brush. They take an
enormous amount of polishing. She seems to do nothing else all day long
but walk about shining one boot, and she breathes on it and rubs it
till you wonder there is any leather left, yet it never seems to get any
brighter, nor, indeed, can you expect it to, for when you look close you
see it is a patent-leather boot that she has been throwing herself away
upon all this time.

Somebody has been having a lark with the poor girl.

The lodging-house slavey brushes her hair with the boot brush and blacks
the end of her nose with it.

We were acquainted with a lodging-house slavey once--a real one, we
mean. She was the handmaiden at a house in Bloomsbury where we once hung
out. She was untidy in her dress, it is true, but she had not quite that
castaway and gone-to-sleep-in-a-dust-bin appearance that we, an earnest
student of the drama, felt she ought to present, and we questioned her
one day on the subject.

"How is it, Sophronia," we said, "that you distantly resemble a human
being instead of giving one the idea of an animated rag-shop? Don't you
ever polish your nose with the blacking-brush, or rub coal into your
head, or wash your face in treacle, or put skewers into your hair, or
anything of that sort, like they do on the stage?"

She said: "Lord love you, what should I want to go and be a bally idiot
like that for?"

And we have not liked to put the question elsewhere since then.

The other type of servant-girl on the stage--the villa servant-girl--is
a very different personage. She is a fetching little thing, dresses
bewitchingly, and is always clean. Her duties are to dust the legs of
the chairs in the drawing-room. That is the only work she ever has to
do, but it must be confessed she does that thoroughly. She never comes
into the room without dusting the legs of these chairs, and she dusts
them again before she goes out.

If anything ought to be free from dust in a stage house, it should be
the legs of the drawing-room chairs.

She is going to marry the man-servant, is the stage servant-girl, as
soon as they have saved up sufficient out of their wages