In Dumfries Corners, even were there no rich red upon the trees, no calendar upon the walls, no invigorating tonic in the air to indicate the season, all would know when autumn had arrived by the anxious, hunted look upon the faces of the good women of that place as they ride on the trains to and from the intelligence offices of the city looking for additions to their menage.  Of course in Dumfries Corners, as elsewhere, it is possible to employ home talent, but to do this requires larger means than most suburbanites possess, for the very simple reason that the home talent is always plentifully endowed with dependents.  These latter, to the number of eight or ten—­which observation would lead one to believe is the average of the successful local cook, for instance—­increase materially the butcher’s and grocer’s bills, and, one not infrequently suspects, the coal man’s as well.

Years ago, when he was young and inexperienced, the writer of this narrative, his suspicions having been aroused by the seeming social popularity of his cook, took occasion one Sunday afternoon to count the number of mysterious packages, of about a pound in weight each, which set forth from his kitchen and were carried along his walk in various stages of ineffectual concealment by the lady’s visitors.  The result was by no means appalling, seven being the total.  But granting that seven was a fair estimate of the whole week’s output, and that the stream flowed on Sundays only, and not steadily through the other six days, the annual output, on a basis of fifty weeks—­giving the cook’s generosity a two weeks’ vacation—­three hundred and fifty pounds of something were diverted from his pantry into channels for which they were not originally designed, and on a valuation of twenty-five cents apiece his minimum contribution to his cook’s dependents became thereby very nearly one hundred dollars.  Add to this the probable gifts to similarly fortunate relatives of a competent local waitress, of an equally generously disposed laundress with cousins, not to mention the genial, open-handed generosity of a hired man in the matter of kindling-wood and edibles, and living becomes expensive with local talent to help.

It is in recognition of this seemingly cast-iron rule that local service is too expensive for persons of modest income, that the modern economical house-wife prefers to fill her menage with maids from the metropolis, even though it happen that she must take those who for one reason or another have failed to please her city sisters.  It may be, too, that this is one of the reasons for the constant changes in most suburban houses, for it is equally axiomatic that once an alien becomes acclimated she takes on a clientele of adopted relatives, who in the course of time become as much of a drain upon the treasury of the household as the Simon-Pure article.

The Brinleys had been through the domestic mill in its every phase.  They had had cooks, and cooks, and cooks, and maids, and maids, and maids, plus other maids; they had been face to face with arson and murder; Mrs. Brinley had parted a laundress armed with a flat-iron from a belligerent cook armed with an ice-pick, and twice the ministers of the law had carried certain irate women bodily forth with the direst of threats lest they should return later and remove the Brinley family from the list of the living.