CHAPTER X: Changing servants.
To the eyes of an English housewife the title of this chapter must appear a very bad joke indeed, and the amusement what the immortal Mrs.
Poyser would call "a poor tale." Far be it from me to make light of the misery of a tolerably good servant coming to you after three months' service, just as you were beginning to feel settled and comfortable, and announcing with a smile that she was going to be married; or, with a flood of tears, that she found it "lonesome." Either of these two contingencies was pretty sure to arise at least four times a year on a station.
At first I determined to do all I could to make their new home so attractive to my two handmaidens that they would not wish to leave it directly.

In one of Wilkie Collins' books an upholsterer is represented as saying that if you want to domesticate a woman, you should surround her with bird's-eye maple and chintz.

That must have been exactly my idea, for the two rooms which I prepared for my maidservants were small, indeed, yet exquisitely pretty.

Of course I should not have been so foolish as to buy any of the unnecessary and dainty fittings with which they were decorated, but as all the furniture and belongings of an English house, a good deal larger than our station home, had been taken out to it, there were sundry toilet tables, etc., whose destination would have been a loft over the stable, if I had not used them for my maids.
I had seen and chosen two very respectable young women in Christchurch, one as a cook, and the other as a housemaid.

The cook, Euphemia by name, was a tall, fat, flabby woman, with a pasty complexion, but a nice expression of face, and better manners than usual.