Then his attachment to the Hydes being mastered by a long-ripening attachment to Mrs. Hyde's seamstress, he married, and removed to the land of promise—the indefinite West. Mrs. Hyde's cook, a worthy maiden of fifty, and most accomplished in her art, having succeeded to an inheritance of some half dozen nieces, was advised by her mistress to set up a pastry-cook's establishment. The young girl whose book of accounts Mrs. Hyde was overlooking at the moment of Lucy's introduction was one of the aforesaid nieces, whom Mrs. Hyde had rescued from a drunken father some years before, and who had recently been qualified for bookkeeper to her aunt by Ella Hyde's instructions. The chambermaid had achieved the usual destiny of our countrywomen, had married, and (unlike most persons in her condition) had completely furnished a snug little house from her savings, besides reserving something against a wet day. Now all these virtues and prosperity, to be transmitted and spread in widening circles, were,
of speculation upon the possible happiness of domestic service and the exercise of the virtues in the relation of employers and employed?
We trespass so far upon private correspondence as to insert here a tribute to American domestics, contained in a letter written by Mrs. Butler after her recent departure for England. "I left all my own household crying, and entreating to return to me whenever I returned; and do you know my heart smote me so dreadfully for what I had said about American servants, that I felt as if I must turn round on the threshold of my own door and beg all their pardons." It must be remembered to the honour of employer and employed in this case, that attachment, and not necessity, was the bond. Mrs. Butler's domestics could probably command fifty places on the day they left her house. Mrs. Butler's compunction was more generous than just, for, in her much-abused journal, she has given an unqualified testimony to the truth and integrity of American servants
