DOMESTIC SERVANTS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19952, 20 November 1926, Page 26

DOMESTIC SERVANTS.

THEIR PATRON SAINT. St. Zita of Lucca, the patron saint of domestic servants, was the daughter of Tuscan peasants living in the hill district near Lucca. When she was 11 years of ago ahe was placed by her parents as a servant-maid in a wealthy clothier’s household in that city, and there she remained until she died —in her sixtieth year. She worked her way up and became children's nurse and finally housekeeper. Kuskin writes of her: —“Here is a quite unquestionable fact, in the thirteenth century, of extreme and lovely significance—that a poor servant girl, living in the midst of an intensely active and warlike city, became so known there, and so beloved for her mere and pure goodness, that 30 years after her death Dante, the greatest poet of Italy, acknowledges her the patron saint of her city and “sufficiently distinguishes a burgher of Lucca tor one of any other city by calling him ‘one of Santa Zita’s Elders.’’’