The Birthday I am thinking of, with Mrs Murchison as a central figure in the kitchen, peeling potatoes for dinner, there was a lacrosse match of some importance for the Fox County Championship and the Fox County Cup as presented by the Member for the South Riding.  Mrs Murchison remains the central figure, nevertheless, with her family radiating from her, gathered to help or to hinder in one of those domestic crises which arose when the Murchisons were temporarily deprived of a “girl.”  Everybody was subject to them in Elgin, everybody had to acknowledge and face them.  Let a new mill be opened, and it didn’t matter what you paid her or how comfortable you made her, off she would go, and you might think yourself lucky if she gave a week’s warning.  Hard times shut down the mills and brought her back again; but periods of prosperity were very apt to find the ladies of Elgin where I am compelled to introduce Mrs Murchison —­in the kitchen.  “You’d better get up—­the girl’s gone,” Lorne had stuck his head into his sister’s room to announce, while yet the bells were ringing and the rifles of the local volunteers were spitting out the feu de joie.  “I’ve lit the fire an’ swep’ out the dining-room.  You tell mother.  Queen’s Birthday, too—­I guess Lobelia’s about as mean as they’re made!” And the Murchisons had descended to face the situation.  Lorne had by then done his part, and gone out into the chromatic possibilities of the day; but the sense of injury he had communicated to Advena in her bed remained and expanded.  Lobelia, it was felt. had scurvily manipulated the situation—­her situation, it might have been put, if any Murchison had been in the temper for jesting.  She had taken unjustifiable means to do a more unjustifiable thing, to secure for herself an improper and unlawful share of the day’s excitements, transferring her work, by the force of circumstances, to the shoulders of other people since, as Mrs Murchison remarked, somebody had to do it.  Nor had she her mistress testified the excuse of fearing unreasonable confinement.  “I told her she might go when she had done her dishes after dinner,” said Mrs Murchison, “and then she had only to come back at six and get tea—­what’s getting tea?  I advised her to finish her ironing yesterday, so as to be free of it today; and she said she would be very glad to.  Now, I wonder if she did finish it!” and Mrs Murchison put down her pan of potatoes with a thump to look in the family clothes basket.  “Not she!  Five shirts and all the coloured things.  I call it downright deceit!”

“I believe I know the reason she’ll say,” said Advena.  “She objects to rag carpet in her bedroom.  She told me so.”

“Rag carpet—­upon my word!” Mrs Murchison dropped her knife to exclaim.  “It’s what her betters have to do with!  I’ve known the day when that very piece of rag carpet—­ sixty balls there were in it and every one I sewed with my own fingers—­was the best I had for my spare room, with a bit of ingrain in the middle.  Dear me!” she went on with a smile that lightened the whole situation, “how proud I was of that performance!  She didn’t tell me she objected to rag carpet!”