or a week or two of the old-time efficiency, her unyielding civility, her scrupulous honesty, her willing acquiescence in any new duty imposed, an impression that she was suffering, any one or all of these reasons kept her on in her place until she became so much a fixture in the household, so much one of the family, that the idea of getting rid of her seemed beyond the possibility of realization.  That the axe should fall her employers knew well, and many a resolve was taken that at the end of the season she should go, yet neither Mrs. Perkins nor her husband liked to tell her so.  Her good points were still too potent, although none could deny that all confidence in her efficiency was shattered past repair.  The situation finally reached a point where it inspired reflections of a more or less humorous order.

“I tell you what I think,” said Thaddeus one evening, after a particularly flagrant breach on Jane’s part, involving a streak of cranberry sauce across a supposititiously clean plate:  “you won’t discharge her, Bess, and I won’t; suppose we send for Mr. Burke, and get him to do it.”

Mr. Burke was the one reliable man in town.  It didn’t make much difference what the Perkinses wanted done, they generally sent for Mr. Burke to do it, largely because when he attempted a commission he saw it through.  A carpenter and builder by trade, he had for many years looked after the repairs needful to the Perkins’ dwelling; he had come often between Thaddeus and unskilled labor; he had made bookcases which were dreams of convenience and sufficiently pleasing to the eye; he had “fixed up” Mrs. Perkins’s garden; he had supplied the family with a new gardener when the old one had taken on habits of drink, which destroyed not only himself but the cabbages; he had kept an eye on the plumbers; he had put up, taken down, and repaired awnings—­in short, as Perkins said, he was a “Universal.”  Once, when a delicate piece of bric-a-brac had been broken and the china-mender asserted that it could not be mended, Perkins had said, “See if Burke can’t fix it,” and Burke had fixed it; and as final tribute to this wonder, Perkins had said, in suffering: 

“My dear, I’m afraid I have appendicitis.  Send for Mr. Burke.”

“Mr. Burke!” echoed his wife.

“Yes, Mr. Burke,” moaned the sufferer.  “If my vermiform appendix is to be removed, I’d rather have Mr. Burke do it with a chisel and saw than any surgeon I know; and I won’t take ether either, because it is such a satisfaction to see him work.”

So, when this happy pair of house-holders had reached what might be described as the grand climateric of their patience, and it was finally decided that Jane’s usefulness was a thing of the past, and utterly beyond redemption, Thaddeus naturally suggested turning to his faithful friend, Mr. Burke, to rid them of their woes, and, indeed, but for Jane’s own intervention, I fear that course would have proved the sole alternative to her becoming an irremovable fixture in the household.  But it was Jane herself who solved the problem.