E.W.L.

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A Svenska Maid.

Marie has been in the United States about four years, and still accents her English with the Lapp-Finn modulations of Northern Sweden.  She is only eighteen years old now.  She has fair hair and a serene fair face somewhat like the Liberty face on our silver dollar.  Her young shape is strong and handsome, and she has white little teeth like a child’s, and the innocent nature of a child.

Marie’s father is a Swedish farmer.  Many adventurers came to America from her neighborhood, and, though but fourteen years old, she wanted to come too; and a cousin’s husband, already settled in Illinois, lent her the passage-money.  The last Sunday, according to custom, all her friends brought offerings to church, and she was made to go through the congregation holding her apron.  They filled it with cake, a Bible, etc.  The young people walked with her parents and herself to the steamer-landing, and kept from crying until she was aboard.

When the steamer was under way an old woman came across her in the steerage, and exclaimed, “Why, child, where are your father and mother?”

To which Marie responded, with the gentle persistence peculiar to her, “I leave them in Svadia.  I go to America.”

Though all the steerage people were kind to her, she fell into bad hands by way of her tender sympathies.  There were a man and woman with a family of small children, who were coming to America carrying an unsavory record.  The woman fell ill, and Marie nursed her, and she fastened herself upon Marie with brutal tenacity.  She took away a little silk shawl the child had inherited and was bringing over as a chief bit of finery.  She had a delicate appetite for steerage fare, and ate up the precious cheese Marie’s mother had given for a parting gift.  And she took charge of Marie’s bit of money, never returning it.

“If she had but left me my cheese,” says the Svenska maid, “I might have had something to eat between New York and Illinois.  I just had my ticket in the cars, and, oh, it was more than two days, and I had such feelings in my stomach!  I was all alone and speak not a word of English, and everybody around me eat, but I would not try to ask for somethings.  A German family by me have lots to eat, and when they left the cars I got down under the seat and pick up orange-peel they throw down, and eat that.  I could not sleep in the night, I feel so bad.  And when I get to Illinois and to Willingham, the Swede people not meet me yet, and a woman took me to her house to get my dinner, I never taste anything so good in my life, but I eat with my hat on.  The woman tried to take it off, and I hold on with both hands.  I thought she was going to take my hat for pay, and I could not do without it.”

The little maid fell sick among her kin, and a great doctor’s bill of a year and a half accumulated upon her.  The cousin’s husband paid it and added the debt to her passage-money.  By the time she was able to work, her pretty pale face had attracted an old man, and this persistent suitor tormented her until she was wellnigh helpless in the hands of her relatives.  They set her debt before her, and reminded her of the obligation she was under to marry a rich man.