aving let the creature abide under her roof for
eleven months, she must justify herself for the act. She meant to
leave town, as I mean to go back to town, and, like me, truckled
weakly to expediency. Nevertheless, her weakness did me a real wrong.

_Shall I pass it on?_

This is the moral question I would sift from what my readers may
regard as trivial and commonplace details. The fact that my experience
is so common as to seem trite, is the most startling feature in the
case. Our American domestic service is a loosely woven web, full of
snarls and knots. It is time that the great national principle that
government must depend upon the consent of the governed, should be
studied and applied to the matter in hand. We, the wage-payers, are
the governed, and without our consent. The recent attempt to enforce
this retroverted law upon a grand scale, in calling a mighty railway
corporation to account for the discharge of a dozen or so out of
several thousand employes, is no stronger proof of this curious
reversal of positions than the demand of my whilom cook that I should
set my hand to a lie.

I caught her once in a falsehood so flagrant that I commended the rule
of truth-speaking to her moral sense, and asked how she reconciled the
sin with her knowledge of what was right.

Her answer was ready: "Oh, there's no sin in a lie that doesn't hurt
yer neighbor!"

Judged even by this easygoing principle, I should sin in penning the
reference without which Katy intimates that she will not withdraw her
foot from my house. She looms before me,--vulgar, determined,
irrational and ignorant,--the impersonation of the System under which
we cringe and groan.

"What would you do?" I ask a friend, who is a successful housewife.

She shrugs her shoulders.

"Oh, swim with the tide! Not to give the certificate will be
equivalent to boycotting yourself. The news of your contumacy will
spread like prairie fires. You will be baited and banned beyond
endurance."

"But--my duty to my neighbor?"

"Thanks to the prevailing rule in these affairs, your neighbor knows
how little a written reference is worth. She will satisfy the
proprieties by reading it, and form her own opinion of the girl. When
Katy has worn out her saucepans and patience, your successor in
misfortune will give her clean papers to the next place. It is a sort
of endless chain of suffering. Then, there is the humane side of the
question. A recommendation of some sort i