Now-a-days I hear that wages are somewhat lower, but the sums I have named were the average figures of six or seven years ago, especially "up-country." Here I feel impelled to repeat the substance of what I have stated elsewhere,--that these rough, queer servants were, as a general rule, perfectly honest, and of irreproachable morals, besides working, in their own curious fashion, desperately hard.

Our family was an exceptionally small one, and the "place" was considered "light, you bet," but even then it seemed to me as if both my domestics worked very hard.

In the first place there was the washing; two days severe work, under difficulties which they thought nothing of.

All the clothes had to be taken to a boiler fixed in the side of a hill, for the convenience of the creek, and washed and rinsed under a blazing sun (for of course it never was attempted on a wet day) and amid clouds of sand-flies.

Not until evening was this really hard day's work over, and the various garments fluttering in the breeze up a valley behind the house.