By great pains and importunity, and an offer of high wages, Grace and John retained Bridget in the establishment, and secured from New York a seamstress and a waitress, and other members to make out a domestic staff.

This sisterhood were from the isle of Erin, and not an unfavorable specimen of that important portion of our domestic life.  They were quick-witted, well-versed in a certain degree of household and domestic skill, guided in well-doing more by impulsive good feeling than by any very enlightened principle.  The dominant idea with them all appeared to be, that they were living in the house of a millionnaire, where money flowed through the establishment in a golden stream, out of which all might drink freely and rejoicingly, with no questions asked.  Mrs. Lillie concerned herself only with results, and paid no attention to ways and means.  She wanted a dainty and generous table to be spread for her, at all proper hours, with every pleasing and agreeable variety; to which she should come as she would to the table of a boarding-house, without troubling her head where any thing came from or went to.  Bridget, having been for some years under the training and surveillance of Grace Seymour, was more than usually competent as cook and provider; but Bridget had abundance of the Irish astuteness, which led her to feel the genius of circumstances, and to shape her course accordingly.

With Grace, she had been accurate, saving, and economical; for Miss Grace was so.  Bridget had felt, under her sway, the beauty of that economy which saves because saving is in itself so fitting and so respectable; and because, in this way, a power for a wise generosity is accumulated.  She was sympathetic with the ruling spirit of the establishment.

But, under the new mistress, Bridget declined in virtue.  The announcement that the mistress of a family isn’t going to give herself any trouble, nor bother her head with care about any thing, is one the influence of which is felt downward in every department.  Why should Bridget give herself any trouble to save and economize for a mistress who took none for herself?  She had worked hard all her life, why not take it easy?  And it was so much easier to send daily a basket of cold victuals to her cousin on Vine Street than to contrive ways of making the most of things, that Bridget felt perfectly justified in doing it.  If, once in a while, a little tea and a paper of sugar found their way into the same basket, who would ever miss it?

The seamstress was an elegant lady.  She kept all Lillie’s dresses and laces and wardrobe, and had something ready for her to put on when she changed her toilet every day.  If this very fine lady wore her mistress’s skirts and sashes, and laces and jewelry, on the sly, to evening parties among the upper servant circles of Springdale, who was to know it?  Mrs. John Seymour knew nothing about where her things were, nor what was their condition, and never wanted to trouble herself to inquire.