“Dear me!” she said, the next morning, when Grace proposed showing her through the house and delivering up the keys, “I’m sure I don’t see why you want to show things to me.  I’m nothing of a housekeeper, you know:  all I know is what I want, and I’ve always had what I wanted, you know; but, you see, I haven’t the least idea how it’s to be done.  Why, at home I’ve been everybody’s baby.  Mamma laughs at the idea of my knowing any thing.  So, Grace dear, you must just be prime minister; and I’ll be the good-for-nothing Queen, and just sign the papers, and all that, you know.”

Grace found, the first week, that to be housekeeper to a young duchess, in an American village and with American servants, was no sinecure.

The young mistress, the next week, tumbled into the wash an amount of muslin and lace and French puffing and fluting sufficient to employ two artists for two or three days, and by which honest Bridget, as she stood at her family wash-tub, was sorely perplexed.

But, in America, no woman ever dies for want of speaking her mind; and the lower orders have their turn in teaching the catechism to their superiors, which they do with an effectiveness that does credit to democracy.

“And would ye be plased to step here, Miss Saymour,” said Bridget to Grace, in a voice of suppressed emotion, and pointing oratorically, with her soapy right arm, to a snow-wreath of French finery and puffing on the floor.  “What I asks, Miss Grace, is, Who is to do all this?  I’m sure it would take me and Katy a week, workin’ day and night, let alone the cookin’ and the silver and the beds, and all them.  It’s a pity, now, somebody shouldn’t spake to that young crather; fur she’s nothin’ but a baby, and likely don’t know any thing, as ladies mostly don’t, about what’s right and proper.”  Bridget’s Christian charity and condescension in this last sentence was some mitigation of the crisis; but still Grace was appalled.  We all of us, my dear sisters, have stood appalled at the tribunal of good Bridgets rising in their majesty and declaring their ultimatum.

[Illustration:  “Who is to do all this?”]

Bridget was a treasure in the town of Springdale, where servants were scarce and poor; and, what was more, she was a treasure that knew her own worth.  Grace knew very well how she had been beset with applications and offers of higher wages to draw her to various hotels and boarding-houses in the vicinity, but had preferred the comparative dignity and tranquillity of a private gentleman’s family.

But the family had been small, orderly, and systematic, and Grace the most considerate of housekeepers.  Still it was not to be denied, that, though an indulgent and considerate mistress, Bridget was, in fact, mistress of the Seymour mansion, and that her mind and will concerning the washing must be made known to the young queen.

It was a sore trial to speak to Lillie; but it would be sorer to be left at once desolate in the kitchen department, and exposed to the marauding inroads of unskilled Hibernians.