She turned out to be very good natured, perfectly ignorant though willing to learn, and was much admired by the neighbouring _cockatoos_, or small farmers.

Lois the housemaid, was the smallest and skimpiest and most angular girl I ever beheld.

At first I regarded her with deep compassion, imagining that she was about fifteen years of age, and had been cruelly ill-treated and starved.

How she divined what was passing in my mind I cannot tell, but during our first interview she suddenly fired up, and informed me that she was twenty-two years old, that she was the seventh child of a seventh child, and therefore absolutely certain to achieve some wonderful piece of good luck; and furthermore, that she had been much admired in her own part of the country, and was universally allowed to be "the flower of the province." This statement, delivered with great volubility and defiant jerkiness of manner, rather took my breath away; but it was a case of "Hobson's choice" just then about servants, and as I was assured she was a respectable girl, I closed with her terms (25 pounds a year and all found) on the spot.

The fat pale cook was to get 35 pounds.