is last, or next to last, celebrity--in
the early winter it is impossible to fix their swift succession--seems
to have suffered amaze at the rude behavior of some dairymaids in the
milk-room of the lady who was showing the celebrity over her premises. I
didn't understand the situation very clearly. The lady must have been a
lady farmer, in order to have a milk-room with dairymaids in it; but in
any case the fact is that when the lady entered with the celebrity the
maids remained seated, where they were grouped together, instead of
rising and standing in the presence of their superiors, as they would
have done in the hemisphere that the celebrity came from."

"Well, what came of it?"

"Oh, nothing. It was explained to the celebrity that the maids did not
rise because they felt themselves as good as their mistress and her
guest, and saw no reason for showing them a servile deference: that this
was the American ideal."

"In the minds of those Swedish, Irish, English, Polish, German, or
Bohemian dairymaids," we murmured, dreamily, and when our reader roused
us from our muse with a sharp "What?" we explained, "Of course they
were not American dairymaids, for it stands to reason that if they were
dairymaids they could not be Americans, or if Americans they could not
be dairymaids."

"True," our friend assented, "but all the same you admit that they were
behaving from an American ideal?"

"Yes."

"Well, that ideal is what the celebrity objects to. The celebrity
doesn't like it--on very high grounds."

"The grounds of social inequality, the inferiority of those who work to
those who pay, and the right of the superiors to the respect of the
inferiors?"

"No, the politeness due from one class to another."

"Such as lives between classes in Europe, we suppose. Well, that is very
interesting. Is it of record that the lady and her guest, on going into
the milk-room where the dairymaids remained rudely seated, bowed or
nodded to them or said, 'Good-day, young ladies'?"

"No, that is not of record."

"Their human quality, their human equality, being altogether out of the
question, was probably in no wise recognized. Why, then, should they
have recognized the human quality of their visitors?" Our satirical
reader was silent, and we went on. "There is something very droll in all
that. We suppose you have often been vexed, or even outraged, by the
ingratitude of the waiter whom you had given a handsome tip, over and
above