I have talked a good deal about this to Jone, and he says I’m getting to be a philosopher; but I don’t think it takes much philosophizing to find out how this case stands.  If house service could be looked upon in the proper way, it wouldn’t take long for American girls who have to work for their living to find out that it’s a lot better to live with nice people, and cook and wait on the table, and do all those things which come natural to women the world over, than to stand all day behind a counter under the thumb of a floor-walker, or grind their lives out like slaves among a lot of steam-engines and machinery.  The only reason the English have better house servants than we have is that here any girl who has to work is willing to be a house servant, and very good house servants they are, too.

Letter Number Eight

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CHEDCOMBE

I will now finish telling you about the great hay-making day.  Toward the end of the afternoon a lot of boys and girls began playing a game which seemed to belong to the hayfield.  Each one of the bigger boys would twist up a rope of hay and run after a girl, and when he had thrown it over her neck he could kiss her.  Girls are girls the whole world over, and it was funny to see how some of them would run like mad to get away from the boys, and how dreadfully troubled they would be when they was caught, and yet, after they had been kissed and the boys had left them, they would walk innocently back to the players as if they never dreamed that anybody would think of disturbing them.

At five o’clock everybody—­farm hands, ladies, gentlemen, school-children, and all—­took tea together.  Some were seated at long tables made of planks, with benches at the sides, and others scattered all over the grass.  Miss Pondar and our maid Hannah helped to serve the tea and sandwiches, and I was glad to see that Hannah wore her pointed white cap and her black dress, for I had on my woollen travelling suit, and I didn’t want too much cart-before-the-horseness in my domestic establishment.

After tea the work and the games began again, and as I think it is always better for people to do what they can do best, I turned in and helped clear away the tea-things, and after that I sat down by a female person in black silk—­and I am sure I didn’t know whether she was the lady of the manor or somebody else until I heard some h-words come out in her talk, and then I knew she was the latter—­and she told me ever so much about the people in the village, and why the rector wasn’t there, on account of a dispute about the altar-cloths, and she was just beginning to tell me about the doctor’s wife sending her daughters to a school that was much too high-priced for his practice, when I happened to look across the field, and there, with the bar lady at the inn, with her hat trimmed with pink, and the Marie Antoinette chambermaid, with her hat trimmed with blue, was Jone, and they was all three raking together, as comfortable and confiding as if they had been singing hymns out of the same book.