She gave me warning, amid floods of tears, directly she arrived, though I could not make out any other tangible complaint than that "the dray had jolted as never was;" and to Clarissa, I gave warning the first day I came into the kitchen.
She received me seated on the kitchen table, swinging her legs, which did not nearly touch the floor.

She had carefully arranged her position so as to turn her back towards me, and she went on picking her teeth with a hair-pin.

I stood aghast at this specimen of colonial manners, which was the more astonishing as I knew the girl had lived in the service of a gentleman's family in the North of England for some time before she sailed.
"Dear me, Clarissa," I cried, "is that the way you behaved at Colonel St.John's ?" Clarissa looked at me very coolly over her shoulder (I must mention she was a very pretty girl, blue-eyed and rosy-cheeked, but with _such_ a temper!) and, giving her plump shoulders a little shrug, said, "No, in course not: _they_ was gentlefolks, they was." I confess I felt rather nettled at this, and yet it was difficult to be angry with a girl who looked like a grown up and very pretty baby.

I restrained my feelings and said, "Well, I should like you to behave here as you did there.

Suppose you get off the table and come and look what we can find in the store room." "I _have_ looked round," she declared: "there 'aint much to be seen." My patience began to run short, and I said very firmly, "You must get off the table directly, Clarissa, and stand and speak properly; or I shall send you down to Christchurch again." I suppose that was exactly what the damsel wished, for she made no movement; whereat I said in great wrath, "Very well, then you shall leave at the end of a month." And so she did, having bullied everybody out of their lives during that time.
Whilst we are on the subject of manners, it may not be out of place to relate a little episode of my early days "up country." I think I have alluded [in "Station Life in New Zealand"] to our book club; but I don't know that it has been explained that I used to change the books on Sunday afternoon, after our little evening service.