Ch. 4: Grandmother Eve - Page 2

persuasion on the place; whilst I was cook, laundress, nurse, housekeeper, manicure, stenographer, and general housemaid, as well as the mother of the family--a situation that even though it involved us in no end of hard work, had its compensations. Living off in suburbs as we did, you can have no idea of what a comfort it was to us not to be at the mercy of a cook who would threaten to leave us every time anything happened to displease her, such as an extra meal to be cooked in emergency cases, or the failure of the cooking-sherry to come up to the exalted standards of her taste as a connoisseur in wines, and hard as the housework was, as I look back upon it now, I realize how much trouble I was spared in not having to follow a yellow-haired fluffy ruffles about the house all day long cleaning up after her. If there is anything of the labor-saving device in that modern invention known as a chambermaid, I don't know where it comes in. I'd rather sweep three floors, and make twenty-nine beds, every day of my life than put in one single week trying to get seven cents worth of efficient work out of a fourteen-dollar housemaid."

At this point I ventured to put in the suggestion that I should have thought some use could have been made of the monkeys in the matter of Domestic Service, whereupon the dear lady, who was not nearly so sensitive on the subject of the Simian family as her husband had always shown himself to be, patted me on the head, and smiled indulgently, as she cracked her little joke.

"Monkeys, my dear Methy," she replied, "were always more efficient in the higher branches. Seriously, however," she went on, "we had that same idea ourselves, and we tried Simian labor for a while, but it was far from satisfactory. They were too playfully impetuous, and we had to give them up as indoor servants. We had a Monkey Butler one season, and nothing could induce him to serve our dinner in that dignified fashion in which a dinner should be served. He would pass the soup with one paw, the fish with the other, while serving the bread with his tail, and all simultaneously, so that instead of dinner becoming a peaceful meal, it was at all times, a highly excitable function that left us all in a state of trembling nervousness when it was over. Try as we might we could not induce them to do one thing at a time, and finally when this particular butler, to whom I have referred, instead of standing as he was instructed to do behind Adam's chair, insisted on swinging from the chandelier over the center of the table suspended by his caudal appendage, we decided that we would rather wait on ourselves."

Asked once if she had not found the primitive life uncomfortable, she shook her head in a decided negative.

"There were too many compensations in our freedom from the things that make your social life of to-day a complex problem," she replied. "In the first place I never