relieving me from the roughest of the work, though she had only contracted for the duties of nurse. But she was my friend—my help in all things, and I treated her accordingly. If she had been treated as many ladies think it necessary to treat their domestics, she would not have stayed with me a month; and why should she? The money we paid her could have been far more easily earned elsewhere; but our gratitude and our affection were make weights against which no scale would have preponderated, though heaped with gold. I remember a circumstance which mammy certainly never will forget, that occurred one day when we had some New-York friends with us. Sabina Rayson was one of them. I was baking a pudding, and my dish was nearly as large as my bakepan; in that case, you know—no, you do not know—for I suppose, Anne, you never baked a pudding in your life."
"Bless you, no—and I trust I never shall."
"Well, if you ever had, you would understand the dilemma I was in. I could not take out my pudding without risking the burning of my fingers. Sabina passed through my kitchen just as I was worrying over it. Mammy stood by, looking on. Sabina stopped to watch my progress, and exclaimed involuntarily, 'Why do you plague yourself with that, Sara? Why don't you let mammy burn her fingers?' Now, you know, Sabina has both sense and kindness; but she had always looked upon domestics as half the world do, as persons created expressly to minister to our pleasure, to burn their fingers for us; and when I replied, 'If anybody, Sabina, is to burn her fingers with the pudding that my friends and I are to eat,
