r to hear every awkward word that had
been spoken.

The good Aunt felt that she had the more cause to be apprehensive in the
latter direction, from some observations that she had accidentally made
a few weeks before. Not long after the coming into the house of Miss
Hetty, cook and kitchen girl, (she is certainly entitled to the prefix
of "Miss," at least once, from the fact of her holding her head a little
higher than any member of the family) a little after her advent, we say,
Aunt Martha happened one evening to pass through the lower hall, in list
slippers, and accidentally became aware that two persons were talking in
a very low tone, just within the door of the dining-room. Perhaps it may
have been accidentally, but possibly on purpose, that she took one
glance through the crack of the door, herself unobserved, and noticed
that the talkers were Judge Owen and Hetty. The tone was certainly
confidential, and the two stood very near together. Had Mrs. Martha
West not been aware of certain points in her brother's character which
would make a criminal flirtation with a servant-girl in his own house
impossible, she might have drawn the conclusion that some impropriety of
that kind was on foot. As it was, she became satisfied that some of her
previous suspicions were correct, and that Judge Owen, who habitually
went to the intelligence-offices and selected the servants when any
change became necessary, was capable of the ineffable meanness of
bribing his domestics to play the spy on his own household and detail
all the occurrences to him! Where the estimable man had picked up that
particular meanness, she had no idea, nor is this a place in which to
hazard a suggestion. If it was so, it might be suggested that the
practice of hearing and allowing weight to spy testimony, caught through
key-holes and the cracks of doors, or picked up by lounging at people's
elbows on sidewalks and in bar-rooms, had possibly some connection with
the application of the same system to his own household.

Perhaps there may be persons upright and straight-forward enough
themselves, and unsuspicious enough of the vices and meannesses of
others, to doubt whether such things as those just hinted at, exist in
the great city. To such it might not be amiss to say, that there are
operations of this character, in what is called "respectable society,"
so much worse than the mere procured espionage of servants, that they
make that atrocity almost endurab