in deepening our well, and
Mary was always going to see how he was getting on, so he used to make
love to her, looking up from the bottom of a deep shaft, and shouting
compliments to her from a depth of sixty feet. What really won her
Irish heart, though, was his calmly putting a rival, a shepherd, into
a water-butt. She could not resist that, so they were married, and are
doing well.

Let no one despise swaggers. They are merely travelling workmen, and
would pay for their lodging if it was the custom to do so. I am told
that even now they are fast becoming things of the past; for one could
not "swagger" by railroad, and most of our beautiful happy vallies will
soon have a line of rails laid down throughout its green and peaceful
length.

Chapter X: Changing servants.

To the eyes of an English housewife the title of this chapter must
appear a very bad joke indeed, and the amusement what the immortal Mrs.
Poyser would call "a poor tale." Far be it from me to make light of the
misery of a tolerably good servant coming to you after three months'
service, just as you were beginning to feel settled and comfortable,
and announcing with a smile that she was going to be married; or, with
a flood of tears, that she found it "lonesome." Either of these two
contingencies was pretty sure to arise at least four times a year on a
station.

At first I determined to do all I could to make their new home so
attractive to my two handmaidens that they would not wish to leave it
directly. In one of Wilkie Collins' books an upholsterer is represented
as saying that if you want to domesticate a woman, you should surround
her with bird's-eye maple and chintz. That must have been exactly my
idea, for the two rooms which I prepared for my maidservants were small,
indeed, yet exquisitely pretty. Of course I should not have been so
foolish as to buy any of the unnecessary and dainty fittings with which
they were decorated, but as all the furniture and belongings of an
English house, a good deal larger than our station home, had been taken
out to it, there were sundry toilet tables, etc., whose destination
would have been a loft over the stable, if I had not used them for my
maids.

I had seen and chosen two very respectable young women in Christchurch,
one as a cook, and the other as a housemaid. The cook, Euphemia by
name, was a tall, fat, flabby woman, with a pasty complexion, but a nice
expression of face, and better manners th