SERVANTS IN MELBOURNE.

Oamaru Mail, Volume X, Issue 4203, 3 September 1888, Page 4

SERVANTS IN MELBOURNE.

A writer in the Argus thus pours forth the agony of his burdened son! on the ■abject of the "cook":—Sir,—You'll be glad to bear that at last we have secured a cook who is almost certain to stay the week oat. She can't cook (that does not matter, my wife does it), bat she is bigbiy . respectable ; her grandfather was a doctor, and she has a brother behind the counter, bat she's modest and unassuming, notwithstanding that, as she pnts it, " she 'atea price." When I heard the conditions I suggested we might as well go without one, bat my wife was horrified. "A hoase without a cook 1 the idea 1" " Bat, my dear," I suggested, " you do all her . work. What does that matter when the world does not know it!" This argument, as yoa will admit sir, was quite unanswerable. The conditions npon which this young lady consented to join oar household I consider very reasonable. She bad LI a week and the spare room. ■ She goes out three nights a week, and has the use of the piano—" just to keep up her music." She drops in aboat 9 p.m., just es we are comfortable over oar coffee, .with "please ma'am, may I play a bit ? " We are &fraid;to say no, and sothe whole of na retreat to a den of my own at the back of the house, 6ft by Btt. We have allowed her to establish a complete form .of domestic communism.aa to the owuer- - ship of linen, etc. And yet we are not . ..happy. This walking about on tiptoe, this constant self-restraint, thia necessity of always addressing her in words and tones fitting her worth and position, lest ahe should give notice, is undermining the constitutions of all of na, including— Toon; Anxious.