The great redeeming-point about the servant-girl is the power she acquires, of getting through a large and multifarious quantity of work.  She has frequently to do the whole house-work, cooking, washing, and ironing for a family of six or seven, and unless the mistress or her daughters are particularly helpful, it is out of all reason to expect that any of these things can be well done.  Of course there are some good servants, but, unfortunately for their employers, the butchers and bakers generally have a keen eye for such, arguing with great justice that a good servant is likely to make a good wife.

The greater part of the high wages which servants get is spent on dress.  If ever they condescend to wear their mistress’s left-off clothes, it is only for work in the house; but the trouble they take to copy the exact fashion and cut of their mistress’s clothes is very amusing.  One girl we had frankly asked my wife to allow her to take a dress she admired to her dressmaker, in order that she might have one made up like it.  Whilst girls in the upper and middle classes are very handy with their fingers, and often make up their own hats and dresses, the servant-class despise to do this, and almost invariably employ milliners, who often cheat them dreadfully, knowing that they appreciate a hat or a dress much according to the price they have paid for it, and the amount of show it makes.  In hats and bonnets this is specially noticeable; I have often seen our servants with hats or bonnets on, which cannot have cost them less than three or four pounds.

The shortest and upon the whole the best way to get a servant is by going to one of the numerous registry offices.  Some of these exist merely to palm off bad servants upon you; but there are always offices of good reputation, which will not recommend a girl they know absolutely nothing about.

The needlewoman is little in vogue here; but as nearly everyone washes at home, washerwomen are plentiful; their wages run from four to five shillings a day, according to their capabilities, food being of course included.

In spite of constant shipments from England, servants are always at a premium, and I need scarcely point out what an excellent opening these colonies afford for women-servants.  Unfortunately, but a very small proportion of the daughters of the poorer colonial working-class will go into service.  For some inexplicable reason, they turn up their noses at the high wages and comparatively light work offered, and prefer to undertake the veriest drudgery in factories for a miserable pittance.  At a recent strike in a large shirt-making factory in Melbourne, it came out that a competent needlewoman could not make more than eighteen shillings a week even by working overtime, and that the general average earnings of a factory girl were only eleven to thirteen shillings a week.  But so great is the love of independence in the colonial girl, that she prefers hard work and low wages in