learn his demerits—­the difference between his real character and his written one.  If he is a rogue, his evil influence remains behind him, and, next to the maidservants, it is the page who suffers most from it.  He becomes—­poor little fellow!—­almost by necessity an accessory to his delinquencies, plays pilot-fish to the other’s shark, and himself grows up to swell the host of bad servants and that army of martyrs their masters and mistresses.

A common cause of a butler’s ruin, and for which he is much to be pitied, is his having married unfortunately.  I had once a good servant whom I was very loth to lose, but whose departure became necessary from his constantly being visited by a wife in advanced stages of intoxication.  Housewives generally prefer a married man for their servant, for reasons that are not inscrutable.  I do not wish to differ from such good authorities.  But though I have no objection to my butler being married, I do object to maintain his wife, which, if he be on good terms with the cook, there is a strong probability of my having to do.  As to his own eating, Heaven forbid that I should grudge it to him; but it is curious and utterly subversive of all medical dogma that both men-servants and maidservants, who take, of course, comparatively little exercise, should, nevertheless, contrive to eat more apiece for dinner than two average Alpine climbers.  Four meals a day, and three of them meat meals, is their usual rate of sustenance, and the food must not only be frequent and plentiful, but very good.  It is a gratifying proof of the rapid influence of civilisation that the daughter of a farm-labourer, accustomed at home to consider bacon a treat and beef a windfall, will, after a month’s experience of her London place, decline to eat cold meat of any kind, reject salt butter as ’not fit for a Christian,’ and become quite a connoisseur as to the strength of bitter ale.  Indeed, two of our present female domestics are ‘recommended’ to drink claret because beer makes them bilious.  I do not mind giving them claret, but I think it hard that under such circumstances I should have had a butler give me warning because the female domestics are ‘not select enough.’  My own impression is, though I scarcely like to mention it, because he was a married man, that he considered them too plain.

The reasons, or at all events the professed reasons, which servants give for leaving their situations are sometimes very curious.  One man left a family of my acquaintance because he said he was interfered with by the young ladies.  ‘Good gracious, what do you mean?’ inquired his mistress.  Her daughters, it appears, were accustomed to arrange the flowers for the dinner-table, whereas, as he imagined, he had a peculiar gift for that kind of decoration himself.