Chapter II: Part 2

The clever woman who wrote _American Wives and English Husbands_, put her Californian heroine in a position in which the one problem she was not required to solve was English housekeeping. She might break her heart over her English husband, but the author does not add to our pangs by relating how her American bride, having first studied the peculiarities of her Englishman, next varied her soul's trials by "wrestling" with the lower but equally irritating problems prepared for her by the English tradesmen. Under which general term are included all the male and female creatures who, having helped to set up a brand-new household, immediately proceed to hinder it from running.

The problem of English husbands I leave to more gifted pens, but I may perhaps be permitted to tell what the American woman experiences, who, having "pulled up stakes," plants herself on English soil. This era of international marriages is not at all confined to the daughters of American millionaires who can afford the luxury of English dukes. Nor, in giving my experiences, do I address the prospective Anglo-American duchess, who would not be likely to spend several sleepless nights, trying to decide whether she should or should not take her carpets or the "ice-chest." However, it is well to give one little word of advice to the American girl proposing to turn herself into an Englishwoman; and that is, she must be very sure of her Englishman, because for him she gives up friends and country, and he has to be that and more to her.

America has a bad reputation for being a very expensive place in which to live. The large earnings are offset, it is said, by expenses out of proportion to the wages. Both facts are exaggerated; and, in contrasting English and American housekeeping, one of the first reasons, I have decided, why English living flies away with money is that the currency itself tends to expense.

To start with, the English unit of money value is a penny--the American a cent, but observe that a penny is _two_ cents in value. I am asked eightpence for a pound of tomatoes; I think "how cheap" until I make a mental calculation, "sixteen cents, that's dear." It is the guileless penny which, like the common soldier, does the mighty executions and swells the bill. One looks on the penny as a cent, and that is the keynote of the expense of living in London.

To go farther into the coinage: there is the miserable half-crown--it is more than half-a-dollar, and yet it only represents a half-dollar in importance. "What shall I give him?" I ask piteously of my Englishman when a fee is in question. "Oh, half-a-crown," is his reply. I obey, and mourn over twelve-and-a-half cents thrown away with no credit to myself.

Poor English people who have no dollar! Don't talk of four shillings! Four shillings are a shabby excuse for two self-righteous half-crowns. Oh, for a good simple dollar! Five dollars make a sovereign, roughly speaking--that wretched and delusive coin which is no sooner changed into shillings and half-crowns than it disappears like chaff before the wind. Now good dollars would repose in one's purse, either in silver or greenbacks (very dirty, but never mind!), and demand reflection before spending.

Think of the importance of a man's salary multiplied by dollars! The wealth of France is undoubtedly due to her coinage--francs are the money of a thrifty middle-class--the English coinage is intended for peers of the realm and paupers. A hundred pounds a year is not a vast income, but how much better it sounds in dollars--five hundred dollars; if, however, you multiply it by francs, twenty-five hundred francs, why it sounds noble! Count an Englishman's income by hundreds, and it does seem shabby! Dollars, when you have four thousand to spend, represent a value quite out of proportion to the eight hundred pounds they really are.

Change your English coinage--don't have half-crowns or sovereigns, but nice simple dollars (call them by any other name if you are too proud to adopt dollars), and see the new prosperity that will dawn on the middle-classes. A little tradesman struggling along on one hundred and fifty pounds a year will feel like a capitalist on seven hundred and fifty dollars. This is not straying from the subject, for it was my first observation in English economics.

On the other hand, the days have passed in America for the making of sudden and great fortunes, nor are the streets paved with gold. The lady from County Cork does not step straight from the steerage into a Fifth Avenue drawing-room (unless by way of the kitchen), but there's work, and there are good wages; and if the lady from County Cork and her brothers and cousins would work as hard in Ireland as they do in the United States, that perplexing island would bloom like a rose. That their fences are always tumbling down, even over there, and their broken windows stuffed with rags, is only an amiable national trait to which the Irish are loyal even in America, just to remind them of home.

"Everything is cheaper in England," they all said when the decisive step whether to take or leave the contents of our large house had to be taken. "It won't be worth packing, taking, and storing. Send everything to auction."

That was the advice. I compromised, and one day half of the dear familiar household gods were trundled off to be sold--alas! and the elect were left to be packed. Every American house has a grass-grown, fenced-in space at the back of the house called a yard, for the drying and bleaching of the laundry. Ours was invaded by three decent men and piles of pine boards, and then the making of cases and the packing began.

The packing was contracted for. The chief of the firm came, looked through each room, estimated, and gave us the price of the whole work completed and placed on the freight steamer. One is told that the English are the best packers in the world, but I have had more damage done in two cases sent from Bristol to London than in eighty cases sent from Boston to Liverpool. The three men worked three weeks, and then took all the cases out of the house and put them on the freight steamer, and the price of all this wonderful packing was about forty pounds. What will surprise an English person is that not one of these men expected a fee. My one ceaseless regret is that I did not take everything, from the kitchen poker to the mouse-trap.

On the arrival of our eighty cases in London, they were received by the warehouse people, who sheltered them until the brand-new English house was ready, which was not for a year. The packing, sending, and storing of all this furniture was under one hundred pounds, which, with my English experience, I knew would have bought nothing. I did question the wisdom of bringing carpets, and I do not think it pays unless they are very good and large--the remaking and cleaning cost too much to waste on anything not very good. Having my furniture safely landed, the next step was to get a house.

One finds that the moderate rents asked for English houses is misleading, for in addition the tenant is expected to pay the rates and taxes, which add to the original rent one-third more, only somehow this fact is ignored. Get a house for one hundred and fifty pounds, and you can add fifty pounds to that by way of rates and taxes. Nor does that enable you to get anything very gorgeous in the shape of a house, but one obtainable for about the same price in New York or Boston, minus those comforts which Americans have come to consider as a matter of course, until they learn better in England. Only in flats are the rates and taxes included in the rent, and when flats are desirable they are expensive.

Now, living in flats is undoubtedly the result of worrying servants, and it is obtaining here as rapidly as the English ever accept a new idea--but being impelled by despair they are becoming popular. Small flats for "bachelor-maids" and childless couples are abundant and well enough, but for families who decline to be trodden on by their nearest and dearest these are nearly impossible, and when possible very dear.

The "flat" contrived for the "upper middle classes" is a terror, and is devoid of the comforts invented by American ingenuity and skill, and the good taste which makes American domestic architecture and decoration so infinitely superior to all. I do not wish to be misunderstood--if money is no object one can be as comfortable in London as in New York, but I am only addressing the "comfortably off."

In New York I was taken to see a very inexpensive flat, which proved to me that the average man can make himself thoroughly comfortable there. It was in an "apartment house" near Central Park. The street was broad and airy. To be sure the flat was up three flights, and there was no lift--but that is nothing. It consisted of four rooms, besides a kitchen and bathroom, and a servant's room. It was entirely finished in oak, and the plumbing was all nickel-plated and open, and it was furnished with speaking tubes. In the nice kitchen was an ice-box, and the kitchen range was of the best. This model flat cost six pounds a month, including heating, and could be given up at a month's notice.

No model flat turning up here, we were reduced to take a house, for which we were willing to give from one hundred and fifty to two hundred pounds. The agony of that search, and the horror of the various mansions offered! For the first time I recognised the wisdom of putting no clothes-closets in London houses, when I think of the repositories of dirt they would inevitably become.

At that time I was not on such intimate terms with the climate as I have since become, and did not understand that it is humanly impossible to rise triumphant over fogs, smuts, and beetles. For my benefit, grim and dingy caretakers rose out of the bowels of the earth as out of a temporary tomb (always in bonnets), and showed us over awful houses in which every blessed thing had been carried away, even to the door knobs and the key-holes--that is of course the metal around the holes.

Awful, closetless houses, guiltless of comfort, with dreary grates promising a six months' shiver, and great gaunt windows rattling forebodingly. As for the plumbing--but it is well to drop a curtain over the indescribable. One does protest, however, against the people who live in these houses--houses whose discomfort an American artisan would not tolerate--looking with ineffable self-complacency on their methods, and sniffing at our American ingenuity and our determination to make life comfortable.

Of course we got a house, thanks to no estate agent, but as we could not rent it we had to buy it--or rather the thirty-eight years' remnant of a lease--a mysterious arrangement to an American. It was rather hard to feel that the house and all our little improvements would, after thirty-eight years, revert to the Bishop of London, to whom the estate belongs, but we thought that after thirty-eight years we might not be so very keen about it. So we disturbed an aged woman in a dusty crape bonnet, and some friendly beetles, and they left the premises simultaneously.

We took an architect on faith, who was to be our shield and protector against the contractor; then we folded our hands, as it were, and retired to an hotel and proceeded to recover from the horrors of house-hunting. This interval was taken by the tradesmen of our new neighbourhood to recommend themselves to me, whose address they discovered by some miracle. They grovelled before me, they haunted me with samples--eggs, cream, butter, bread, followed me to the ends of England, and I finally succumbed to the most energetic.

Gradually, one gets accustomed to "patronage" and "patron," rare words in America, where the "I am as good as you" feeling still obtains. I am becoming used to them as well as "tradesmen" and "class." I acquiesce in a distinct serving class, conscious that not to be aware of the dividing gulf would mean the profound scorn of those we have agreed to call our inferiors.

To return to the house. The architect and I looked it over--everything was wanting. The plumbing was new, but clumsy and inadequate. In an American house much less costly, there would be a hanging cupboard in each room, thus dispensing with the clumsy and expensive wardrobes. The plumbing would be pretty and nickel-plated, resisting the action of the air, and easily kept clean. Here it is always brass or copper, clumsy and easily tarnished.

The architect suggested only the obvious, and with unwarranted faith I hardly ventured to suggest anything; but when the summer brought an American friend, who looked over the house, then approaching completion, she sat on the solitary chair and shook her head.

"He hasn't thought of a single thing," she cried. "Think of not having a dumb-waiter (English: dinner-lift) in this unheated house. Stone walls and cold blasts--don't invite me to your lukewarm repasts! Besides you must have a hardwood floor" (parquet floor) "in your drawing-room" (being an American she really said _parlor_). "Think of all the dirty carpets it will save," she urged. "My dear, you don't mean to say that you will live in this Bunker Hill Monument of a house"--(she comes from Boston)--"without speaking tubes?" She was aghast.

"What an architect! Supposing you want to speak to the cook, why you'd have to run down four flights for a _tête-à-tête_; then supposing you want coals up four flights--must the maid climb up four flights to find out what you want before doing it? My dear, even an English servant has human legs, and she can't stand it."

I was convinced. I spoke to the architect, and he was politely acquiescent, and as all these very necessary suggestions came late they were doubly expensive, and now I have come to the conclusion that domestic architecture is the proper field for a woman with ideas--a mere man-architect does not know the meaning of comfort, ingenuity, resource, and economy.

As the house declined to get done, I braved the architect, the contractor, and the workmen, and arrived one day in company with a bed, a table, and a chair (also a husband), and took possession.

I did have one treasure at the time--a caretaker. She saved my life, and she protected my innocent self from the British tradesman, whilst she gently taught me what the British servant will and will not do. She informed me when I was paying twice as much as right to the obsequious tradesman, and she regulated the (to me) perplexing fee. She was very religious, and I think she looked upon me as her mission and that she was to rescue me--which she did. Her wages were one pound a week including her food, and to be just I could not have got such a treasure in America at the price.

The most obvious defect we discovered in our house was that it was very cold--a universal English drawback--and the inadequate open fires seem to accentuate the chill.

Would that my feeble voice could do justice to the much-calumniated American methods of heating! It does pay to be less prejudiced and more comfortable! Possibly the furnace and steam heat may be a little overdone, but not with moderate care. No one can make me believe that it is healthy to sit shivering all over, or roasting on one side and freezing on the other. Neither do I consider a red nose and chilblains very ornamental. I admit that furnaces are not a crying need in England all through the winter, but from December to March it is a pretence to say you are comfortable, for you are not. There is no doubt but New England has bad throat and lung troubles, yet so has Old England and the hardening process does not save, if statistics are right. If I must take cold and die, at least I prefer to do so comfortably.

If there were a furnace I should not need gas-stoves (which are certainly no more poetic than a register or a radiator, besides being distinctly sham), nor would there be a perpetual procession of coal-scuttles going upstairs, unless an open fire is desired for additional warmth and cheerfulness.

This brings one to the relative costs of coal, water, and gas. London coal is greasy, soft, and dear. Where the hard coal is burned in the States, it leaves white cinders and ashes. It burns slowly and is therefore very profitable, and the price averages about twenty-four shillings a ton. Must the cheek of English beauty always be adorned with "blacks"?

The water-rates here are just double those of Boston, where, O rapture! we had two bathrooms, and where the "sidewalk" (American for pavement) was thoroughly washed every morning. In Boston gas was charged for at the rate of four shillings for one thousand cubic feet; here we pay three shillings for the same, and yet for infinitely less gas used our bills here are mysteriously larger. Our London electricity is both expensive and poor; consumers are at the mercy of the companies, and a little wholesome competition is very imperative.

The English are reckoned a nation of grumblers, but one finds that the grumbler ends in grumbling, though in moments of supreme anguish he writes to _The Times_, which permits, with the impartiality of Divine Providence, both the just and the unjust to disport in its columns.

Considering the papering and painting of the house done--the painting done very roughly from our point of view. Then the kitchen needed a new range and so we got the most expensive of its kind--expensive for America even--but the acknowledged solidity of English workmanship (which sometimes becomes clumsiness) is well in place here. The dinner-lift had been constructed for one flight, and was surprisingly dear, while the parquet floor in the drawing-room cost twenty-seven pounds where it would have cost fifteen pounds in America.

This brings me to a point on which I wish to lay great stress: the remarkable progress in America in all the applied and domestic arts within the last ten years, which leaves England far behind. Our English house was just old enough to be surprisingly ugly--it belongs to the early Victorian period. Without wishing to spend too much money in its decoration, we did feel that we ought to put away the funereal mantel-pieces and set up something more æsthetic.

Our architect--always obliging and never suggestive--took us to see wooden mantel-pieces, and we found them expensive and clumsy. In this strait my Englishman had an inspiration. "Buy them in New York"--we were just going over--"and you will find them prettier, better, and cheaper even if the freightage has to be added to the price."

I would not believe him because I also was still labouring under the delusion that England was cheap and America dear. However, we went to New York and there we bought three wooden mantels--six feet high and six feet wide--of the best quartered oak, of so simple and graceful a design that they are always noticed and admired. These three were packed, sent, and landed at our front door in London, and the price, all included, was not much more than we should have paid for the only one in London of which I approved. I feel convinced that there is a great market here for American wood-work as well as leather, iron, and glass, for with English excellence of workmanship they combine a taste which adapts the best to its own uses. It would revolutionise the decoration of English houses.

The American has the advantage that he is not conservative where that stands between him and progress. That something was good enough for his ancestors is no reason why it should satisfy him. Because they chose to freeze is no reason why he should. Somehow, one always comes back to the inadequate heating, for as I write, my face is flaming while a lively icicle penetrates my spine.

The carpets being now down, I sent to the warehouse for the eighty cases, and after a year again looked at my household goods. They were very skilfully unpacked, but (here is the difference between the English and the American workman) each one of the men expected a fee every time he moved a box for me. Every time I went to the warehouse to open a trunk one or two men had to be fee'd, and at the end it came to quite a little sum. In America, this would not have been expected, even for harder work done, and quite rightly, for the men were receiving proper wages, and I was paying the Storage Company liberally.

Our American furniture being cosmopolitan it was speedily at home in our English rooms; only these high studded rooms have such a way of devouring furniture! I thought piteously of that which I had rashly flung into the Boston auction-room, and when it came to replacing it, what did I find? That American furniture is much better and much cheaper. My soul yearned even for the big black chest of drawers which I had left behind, and it loathed the brand-new "art furniture," sticky with paste and varnish.

I demanded Chippendale and such--but, alas! their day is over, except for millionaires! Praed Street, Brompton Road, Great Portland Street, and Wardour Street should blush for the faked-up antiquities that ogle the passerby. I have no prejudice against modern furniture if it is good; nor do I love old furniture simply because it is old, but undoubtedly the old taste was artistic and simple, and workmen had plenty of leisure and used their hands. But when it comes to American or English machine-made furniture I prefer the American because, it is in better taste, is made of better wood, and is cheaper.

I paid twenty-four shillings apiece for painted pine chests of drawers for the servants. In New York I saw a pretty one, all of oak with brass handles, for thirteen shillings. That is only a sample. Perhaps it is ungenerous urging the importation of American wares that can, because of English free trade, undersell the English manufacturer, but it remains true that it can be done, and ought to be done, and competition will improve the home produce, and there is room for improvement.

Well, having finally got my dwelling into some kind of order, I and my new British and old American household goods proceeded to keep house together.

This brings me to the question of English and American domestic service. It is an article of faith that America being the home of the free (and independent) will before long have no servants, but only "mississes." It is not quite so bad, by any means. To be sure wages are much higher, but the American servant does twice the work of an English servant.

The average American family keeps two servants and a man who comes in twice a day to "tend" the furnace--the central stove which heats the entire house. The cook gets fifty pounds a year, the housemaid forty pounds, and the man, who gets neither food nor lodging, eighteen pounds. The total is one hundred and eight pounds, which includes the baking of all the bread and the doing of the weekly laundry for the entire house; the only additional expenses being for coal and soap.

Now for the wages in an English family of the same standing:--Cook thirty-five pounds, parlour-maid twenty-six pounds, housemaid twenty pounds, char-boy eight pounds, and fifty pounds to the laundry for work which is quite disgraceful. The sum total is one hundred and thirty-nine pounds, which does not include the feeding of an additional person, and a servant's board is a greater expense than her wages. Distinctly the economy is on the American side.

That the servant business is a trade was a fact impressed on me for the first time by my very intelligent English cook. Each English servant has her trade which she knows and she declines to meddle with what she does not know, for which reason the dividing lines are rather strictly laid down. It was something I had to learn so as not to call on one servant to do the duties of another. Our American servants are more liberal, but now I realise that a good English servant is not so much an amateur as an American; but unless you wish to be unpleasantly enlightened as mistress, you must learn her line of duty well.

To keep house one must have servants, and in a strange place the first problem is how to get them. Supposing no friend can recommend you one, you are reduced either to advertising or the registry office. Registry offices, through which the majority of sufferers get their "help," riot in ungodly prosperity. They have managers and clerks, like a bank and, like other corporations, they have no souls. If you are a meek lady they snub you, and if you are undecided they give you bad advice. At any rate the unscrupulous ones, and there are plenty of these, take your fee whether you get a servant or not.

It seems as if a certain amount of honesty should obtain even in this business, and I protest against paying five shillings for the mere joy of talking to a stately female, the presiding goddess in the generally ill-ventilated temple, who pockets my money and, as soon as my fee is safe, takes no further earthly interest in me. The methods of English registry offices seem to me the brazenest kind of piracy. Why don't English women rebel? Are they not the daughters and wives of grumblers, and probably the mothers also? However, fate was kind to me, and I got three servants, two of good village families, while the superior cook was the legacy of a brilliant woman, a good deal of whose wisdom I have since had at second-hand.

In the economy of the universe I know that there is a serving class, but we people of New England are not glib in the use of the word "servant." Do we not (in the country) call them "helps" when the expression is base flattery? Here, class distinctions have put the matter on a practical footing--servants are servants and recognise themselves as such, and have that outward and visible sign of well-trained domestics which the Irish girl, direct from her paternal pig-sty, scorns in New York.

"You must not think," said my intelligent cook, "that we don't have our feelings as much as you." There it was, and she put herself as a matter of course on quite a different plane of human beings; the American servant, on the other hand, would consider herself of the same class, but ill-used by circumstances. A clever woman once said to me, "You can't expect all the Christian virtues in the kitchen for five dollars a week!" But we do! Perhaps the most precious gift I received when I left Boston was this advice: "Don't see too much."

Servants are like children; to keep them under control you must impress them. They object to a mistress who is too clever with her hands, but they like her praise. An American servant does not lose respect for a mistress who, if necessary, can "lend a hand," but the English servant sees in such readiness a distinct loss of dignity. Many a time have my American servants seen me on the top of a step-ladder doing something that required more intelligence than strength, and they have respected my power to "do." Here something keeps me from the top of the step-ladder--instinct probably.

An American treats her servants more considerately than an Englishwoman. I am conscious of saving my servants too much; often (I confess it with shame) I run down a flight or two to meet them, and there is no doubt that the more I do the more unwilling and ungrateful they become.

With three English servants, besides a boy (not to speak of the laundry), now doing the work of two American servants, I proceed. I have mentioned a vital and nearly fatal subject--the laundry. In London it is awful but inevitable, and one cannot wonder any more at the stupendous dirt of the lower classes. Are their things ever washed, and if so who pays? After much observation I have decided that they make up by a liberal use of starch what they lack in soap and water and "elbow-grease."

Language fails an American direct from the land of clear skies, sunshine and soap and water, when she contemplates the harrowing results of steam laundries. Really the most expensive of luxuries in London is to keep clean! When on Sunday afternoons one sees in Kensington Gardens a poor infant with a terribly starched and dirty cap on its head (in the form of a muffin), enveloped in an equally dirty and starched cape, and carried by a small girl in fearfully starched and dingy petticoats, one recognises maternal pride which rises superior to London dirt.

I am the client of a "model" laundry which sends our linen back a delicate pearl-grey. We call it affectionately the "muddle" laundry, and it costs us one pound a week to keep up to the pearl-grey standard. I wish we could go back to the days of chain-armour! What remedy? There is none, except country laundries for the rich and great, and starch for the poor! The only result of soft coal and dire necessity is the excellence and cheapness of the cleansing establishments, without which the long-suffering householder would indeed sit in sackcloth and ashes!

The one aim in furnishing our little house has been to keep the rooms free from all unnecessary draperies, which are merely traps for dust. It is hard for me to curb my feminine taste, which runs to sofa cushions and Oriental nooks lighted by Venetian lamps, but the exigencies of the London climate make me strictly Colonial (New England Colonial), and I can look into every corner--blessed privilege. The laundry being an accepted evil, one institution I willingly proclaim cheap--the scrub-woman who gets half a crown a day. Why don't all English scrub-women emigrate to the States in a body? They would get from six to eight shillings a day, overtime overpay.

Coming to the details of housekeeping. The custom here is that tradesmen call for orders. That also obtains in America, but many ladies there go to the markets and select and order for themselves, which is distinctly more economical. Here, as the result of inadequate storage room, the expense of ice, and the by no means common use of the ice-box, there is not much food kept in the house. Now the laying-in of a good supply once or twice a week, if the mistress understands ordering and goes where she pleases, is undoubtedly cheaper than a daily ordering of driblets. It is the same with groceries, and these should be kept under lock and key! To the American that is not only an impossibility, it is nearly an insult, and I know of not a single American housekeeper who weighs out the groceries and other articles to be used week by week. It seems to start the mutual relationship of mistress and maid on a basis of suspicion.

A tabulated list of values is useless where prices fluctuate. I simply compare the differences as I have found them in my own little housekeeping. Meat, with the exception of fillet and sirloin, is dearer here, and so is poultry. Groceries average about the same, but coffee and flour are dearer. So are butter and eggs. Milk is the same, but tea, dear to the English heart, is so cheap that one can undermine one's nervous system at a very small expense. Vegetables are good and cheap, but there is little variety, while fruit is dear.

How one does miss the ordinary cheap, good fruits, the California grapes and the Concords with their clusters of deep blue berries, a five-pound basket of which only costs a shilling. These were first grown in the old New England town that Emerson made famous. As for apples, pears and peaches, they are among the cheap fruits over the sea, and I maintain their superiority to their English kin.

What oranges equal the Floridas? The "forbidden-fruit" and the "grape-fruit," are only just making their conquering way into the English shops. If, as it is claimed, the one is the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden, Eve is nearly justified!

Yes, there are many good things in America and at reasonable prices. One has only to think of the divine "sweet corn" and "squash" and "sweet potatoes," and even the modest white bean from which all New England makes its national dish of "pork and beans."

Fish there is in great variety in London, but that also I find dear. How is it possible for me to live in a land where lobsters and oysters are a luxury and not a necessity? Only a housekeeper knows what a refuge they are in trouble--when an unexpected visitor turns up. Is not the "oyster stew" (a soup of milk and oysters) an American national dish? But it could only reach perfection in that blessed land where to eat oysters is not to suck a copper key, and where they exist in regal profusion. I look with scorn at the measly, little lobsters for each of which the fishmonger demands three ridiculous shillings instead of one shilling and three pence. My heart longs for lobster _à la Newburg_ till I remember that it takes three of these poor creatures to make the dish--nine shillings! So I continue to yearn and keep my nine shillings.

I cannot, however, leave the subject without expressing my admiration for the beauty of the English fish shops and butcher shops. To see a fish shop in London is to see a trade haloed with poetry. If I were a fishmonger I would sit among my stock-in-trade and be inspired. The fishmonger is an artist, he constructs pictures of still-life which would have been revelations to the greatest of Dutch masters. In America our fish shops are devoid of poetry--the only compensation being to see the mountainous piles of oysters, ready to be opened, and innumerable great red lobsters.

To one item of American economy I wish to return with added stress; that is, the baking of bread in each house. This household-bread, if well made, is delicious, substantial, and economical. Usually the cook bakes twice a week, and besides that she is expected to have ready for breakfast either fresh baked "biscuits" (scones), "muffins," or "pop-overs." The yearly allowance of flour for each person is one barrel, and one reckons the expense to be about half what bread costs here. The English "double-decker" is a fearful and wonderful production that errs on the side of heaviness, just as the American baker's bread errs on the side of frivolous lightness, and nourishes like froth.

Whenever Americans proclaim the cheapness of a visit to London one finds without exception that they live here as they would not dream of living at home. Were they to take lodgings there in the same economic manner, they could live quite as cheaply.

Another inexpensive commodity--which becomes very expensive in the end--is cabs. There is no doubt that they are cheap, and the fatal result is that they are used to an extent which makes them a serious item of expense to a family of moderate means. In America we pay two shillings each for a short drive in that stately vehicle called a "hack," and the price is prohibitive for an average family except on "occasions." So cab fares are not a serious item in domestic expenses.

From experience, I believe that America has a very unmerited reputation for expense. Live well, even if not ostentatiously, in London, and it costs fully as much as in New York or Boston. One does not judge by millionaires or beggars, for both are independent of statistics, but by the middle classes. Houses are here singularly devoid of comforts, and, taking the same income, I should say a middle-class American family could live there as cheaply as here, but with more comfort; and when it comes to schooling for children, an item to which I have not alluded, with infinitely greater advantages.

In writing down these desultory reflections, I have been actuated by the thought that what I have learned may be of use to some puzzled American creature, who, having married an Englishman, proposes to live in England with only American standards to guide her. She must not believe, as I was told, that an American income will go one-third farther here. It does not. She must be prepared to accept other methods, even if, secretly, she modifies them a little to suit her American notions; but she must not boast, for her well-meaning efforts will, at best, be regarded with good-natured tolerance.

How I wish I could clap a big, stolid, conservative, frost-bitten English matron into a snug American house, with a furnace, and heaps of closet (cupboard) room, and all sorts of bells and lifts and telephones, and then force her to tell me the absolute, unvarnished truth! What would she say?

In conclusion, I wonder if I, as an exiled American sister, might make a plea to my American brethren? It is that when they send their wedding invitations, as well as others, printed on their swellest "Tiffany" paper, they will kindly put on enough postage. Why should one have to pay five-pence on each joyful occasion? On some, bristling with pasteboard, I have even had to pay tenpence,--why add this pang to exile?

_Kitchen Comedies_

My superior cook had just given me notice, and I felt that the bottom had dropped out of the universe. She was an ancient retainer, according to twentieth-century standard, for she had been with me three months.

Her claim to fame rested on her once having cooked for Lord Kitchener. Whenever we had a trifling difference of opinion, which was seldom, because I didn't dare, she always retorted that she had cooked for Lord Kitchener, and, of course, I realised that I was but an unworthy successor to that great man. I suffered a good deal from his lordship in those days, and fervently pray that Fate will not throw in my blameless path either his parlour-maid or his laundress.

I had felt so safe, for cook lured me on with false hopes: she offered to make marmalade, and she demanded a cat. This was tantamount to staying for ever. She made the marmalade, and we scoured the neighbourhood for a cat.

It may be a digression, but I really must remark here on the scarcity of any particular commodity of which one happens to stand in need. If the world can be said to be overstocked by any one article it really might be said to be cats; but had we been in search of a Koh-i-noor it could not have been more hopeless. We waited three months for a cat to be made to order, so to speak, and the very day his godmother left--we named him in honour of our departed cook--he appeared in the person of a long, lank, rattailed, ignominious tabby, on whom food made no earthly impression. His name is Boxer--Mister Boxer.

There is a great daily paper in London in whose columns the nobility and gentry clamour for what the Americans delicately call "help." I have myself pressed into four alluring lines a statement of the advantages I had to offer, and have received no reply. I have answered thirty-five advertising parlour-maids, enclosing stamped envelopes, and have had no reply. My cook having retired from the scene, and there being nothing left to remind me of her but Mister Boxer, I again sought solace in those delusive columns.

"What have I done," I cried in anguish, "that all cooks should avoid me?"

Just then my dearest friend was announced; at least, she is as dear as distance will permit in London.

"What's happened?" she asked at once.

I explained mournfully that cook had gone.

"Whenever we had company she always said it wasn't Lord Kitchener, though I never said it was."

"I wish to goodness," and my friend flung herself into the nearest chair, "that my cook would go."

For a moment I gasped; it sounded so audacious.

"Give me a new cook every week," she cried, "but deliver me from eating the same cooking for twenty-six years, as we have done. Adolphus says he has eaten four thousand French pancakes filled with raspberry jam, in that time, and that he'll die if he eats another one. I don't blame him," she added gloomily, "but what are we to do? I've urged her to better herself, but she won't. She quarrels with every servant who comes into the house; she's as deaf as a post, and she cooks abominably unless we have a dinner-party. If we weren't poor I'd pension her off; but we can't afford it," and she gave a bounce of resignation. "So don't talk to me of ancient family retainers; I'm sick of them!"

"You don't know what you are talking about," I said solemnly. "Listen to me. Last week I read an advertisement put in by a lady for her cook who was leaving--a cook with all the Christian virtues. I decided to answer it at once, but then I remembered the thirty-five who never replied to my letters. Just then He came down, placid and smiling--you know his way--and I explained to him that an Honourable Mrs. Smith was advertising for a place for her cook, in whom she took a personal interest.

"'My dear,' he said, 'don't write! Hire an ambulance and fetch her back, for a cook so recommended cannot be long for this world.'

"I took his advice and flew there in a hansom, and I was so excited that I forgot to watch the horse's ears. It was ten o'clock when I reached the Honourable Mrs. Smith's, and it was just like a smart 'at home.' At first I thought we had gone to the wrong house. Five ladies were going in, and I passed six in the hall. There were several reception-rooms and not a chair without a lady. A perplexed, willowy creature without a hat, who turned out to be the Honourable Mrs. Smith, led me to a seat under an imitation palm-tree, and said it was dreadful and that she would never do it again. Her cook had received forty-five letters and twenty wires; and fifteen messenger-boys and thirty-two ladies had called.

"There were twenty letters from persons of title. Of course, I thought of Lord Kitchener, and felt it useless to stay, but as I had come the Honourable Mrs. Smith advised me to wait; she was very civil.

"Now, you know my three rules: I won't have mixed religions in the kitchen because of squabbles; I won't take a servant out of a 'flat'; and I don't want one who wears glasses.

"When the paragon and I met under the imitation palm, I found she was all I did not want. She questioned me severely, and said that she was a Roman Catholic. I felt that the religion of a being for whom twenty of the nobility were clamouring was no concern of mine, and I was surprised when she asked me to leave my address. So little did I aspire to the paragon that I did not even ask if she could cook. I passed ladies still arriving, and I was so melancholy that I went home in a 'bus.

"The next morning I had a letter, and I can truly say I never was so flattered in my life, not even when HE asked me to marry him, for the paragon had chosen me out of one hundred and sixty-five ladies, exclusive of twenty of the nobility.

"To be sure, she went against all my principles and I did not even know if she could cook; but she had chosen me!

"So she arrived in company of three cardboard bonnet-boxes and a japanned tin trunk.

"HE suggested that we should try her on a lunch, and we did. Thank goodness, we only had four of his chums, or I should have died of mortification. After all, a clever man is sometimes duller than the dullest woman.

"How she cooked! It was appalling! Our parlour-maid, who has lovely manners, served a series of horrors as if they were a feast for the gods. After luncheon I found cook had broken my best cut-glass salad bowl, and two old Worcester plates, and then finished off with nervous prostration on the kitchen floor. HE and I dined out that night; we had had too much of the comforts of home.

"The next morning the housemaid appeared with joy in her usually blank eyes, and said cook had gone and taken her boxes. At first I thought she had gone to High Mass. But no, she had really gone with her heavy tin trunk and the three bandboxes. How she got them down at midnight over four creaking flights of stairs without being heard, we shall never know, but she did. We found out afterwards that the Honourable Mrs. Smith had had this paragon just one month, and then she was anxious to get rid of her in a hurry; so she advertised. It was cruel, wasn't it? Really, you know, it is wicked of you to complain when a servant has been faithful to you for twenty-six years."

My friend, who had been made cynical through suffering, said her cook wouldn't have been faithful if she could have got a better place.

The servant problem is indeed a very sore subject and singularly serious in England. For this there are two reasons: class distinctions, and also because so many more servants are needed here to do a given amount of work than anywhere else. Of course, a great leisured class means also a great serving class, and this serving class is useless for others, because it has been brought up to false standards of expenditure and to a good deal of idleness. Take this class out of the supply, and also the ever-increasing numbers to whom the smattering of Board School education has taught just enough to make them good for very little, so that in their proper pride they prefer to pass the weary years in cheap department stores or starve on factory wages. Then it is very conceivable that the servant supply does not equal the demand.

The result is that the registry offices do a thriving trade in sending out all sorts of undesirable and ignorant human beings to be thorns in the flesh of unsuspecting housekeepers.

There is something so pathetically reckless in our everyday life! How little we know of the servants we take into our intimate lives out of this terrible London with its vices and crimes, discovered and undiscovered. Recommendations are simply the blind leading the blind. The worst servant I ever had came with a glowing personal character.

Why will not women tell the truth! Perhaps it is characteristic of the weaker vessel to be more tactful, to put it delicately, than men. The lack of truth is partly a desire not to be bothered and partly a rather spiteful wish that the other woman may find out for herself, and also a cowardly fear to do a poor girl an ill turn. I rejoice to say that I found one honest woman who prevented my taking a burglar's assistant to my heart. But she was more than a woman, for she was also a physician. When a woman takes to a man's profession she at the same time takes on something of a man's virtues.

To this lady I went for a personal character of an ideal housemaid, who said she had left her last place because the lady would not permit a "follower." Thinking I might not be so bigoted in regard to followers, human nature being human nature, I was prepared for an area romance, but not for a shilling shocker.

The ideal, so the lady told me honestly, was beloved by a job butler next door. She had been a nice country girl, but London and the job butler had proved her destruction. Area railings and bolts were as nothing to them. The area bell was for ever ringing, and when, by highest command, it remained unanswered, then did the job butler make a constant practice of ringing the front-door bell at unearthly hours, until finally the police had to interfere. Then, soured by the course of true love running so far from smooth, the job butler broke in one night and took things. Whether the loving housemaid was a party to the burglary was not proved, but she was discharged at a moment's notice, and it was then that she applied to me.

"I couldn't let you take her with eyes closed," said this true philanthropist, and so I declined the young burglar's assistant.

In another article I have compared English and American servants. Briefly repeated, the American servant will do twice the work of an English servant, nor are her rules cast-iron. She is open to reason, accepts new methods, and is not conservative. Conservatism, to a certain point, wherever found, represents a caution that is wisdom; but the conservatism of servants rests on colossal ignorance, the result of experience gathered from innumerable "ladies," many quite as ignorant as their servants. In these progressive days they keep them too short a time to care to teach them anything, and are mostly glad enough to "muddle along" any way. Never have servants been treated so well as now and never have they as a rule been so bad.

The world, in spite of its Rockefellers, Carnegies, and Rothschilds, is made up of people with modest incomes, and it is these who suffer most keenly under the mistaken aspiration of the servant class. The impossibility of getting servants, makes them resigned to put up with unbearable shortcomings, for complaints result in immediate notice being given, and, after all, a bad servant is better than no servant. So the servant never learns, and takes her faults to the next sufferer.

The head of one of the most trustworthy of the London registry offices told me that the decadence of servants had its rise during the first Jubilee of Queen Victoria. There was such an influx of strangers in London that country servants were imported at huge wages, while, on the other hand, innumerable London servants threw up their situations simply "to see the fun." Since then, she affirmed, they have become a restless lot, changing from one place to the other without reason, except for the sake of excitement, and generally demanding big establishments, less work, and increasing wages. I have heard more complaints of servants in England in a few years than in my whole life in America.

The country servants' Mecca is London, and no sooner have they reached it than they join that restless procession with the japanned tin trunks. What becomes of them? Where do they finally go with their false standards and blank faces! Those awful blank faces, as impenetrable as that of the Egyptian Sphinx.

Servants can be divided into two classes: those that aspire to serve the nobility, and the others who circulate among the middle-classes. The outward and visible distinctions of the former are the perfection of menial smartness, the women's starched apron-bows cocked to an impertinent angle, and their faces a blank. On the other hand, the middle-class servant never really succeeds to a blank face, which is the result of years of practice, and sometimes she even smiles. Also her apron is often put on in a hurry, and much starch brazens out holes; besides, her face invites "smuts."

Then there is a kind of manservant who revolves in boarding-houses and among certain kinds of distracted families, who is too awful to contemplate. Those fatal, ill-fitting evening clothes that shine with age and grease. He mostly comes from foreign parts, and, instead of presenting to the spectator a blank wall of a face, he stares at you in agonised misapprehension. As a foreigner, he is naturally despised by his British fellow servants. Has not the Englishman a perfectly natural conviction that Divine Providence is a British institution, and that the heavenly language is English?

The rest of the world (with the exception in these days of Americans) he labels as foreigners, and foreigners he either tolerates, overlooks, or despises. His main attitude is one of amiable indifference, which is, indeed, his little weakness, for it blinds him to the possible strength of what he does not consider worth guarding against. I asked a distinguished Englishman if he often went abroad. "No," he said, quite without humour, "I hate meeting so many foreigners."