These three comforts of a home are sometimes quite indistinguishable with us: the tea is frequently made up of fragments of dinner, and the beds are always sprinkled with crumbs.
Their source is a mystery, unless they fall from the clothing of the chambermaids, who frequently drop hairpins and brooches and buttons between the sheets, and strew whisk brooms and scissors under the blankets.
We have two general servants, who are supposed to do all the work of the house, and who are as amiable and obliging and incapable as they well can be.

Oonah generally waits upon the table, and Molly cooks; at least she cooks now and then when she is not engaged with Peter in the vegetable garden or the stable.

But whatever happens, Mrs.Mullarkey, as a descendant of one of the Irish kings, is to be looked upon only as an inspiring ideal, inciting one to high and ever higher flights of happy incapacity.

Benella ostensibly oversees the care of our rooms, but she is comparatively helpless in such a kingdom of misrule.

Why demand clean linen when there is none; why seek for a towel at midday when it is never ironed until evening; how sweep when a broom is all inadequate to the task?
Salemina's usual remark, on entering a humble hostelry anywhere, is: "If the hall is as dirty as this, what must the kitchen be! Order me two hard-boiled eggs, please!" "Use your 'science,' Benella," I say to that discouraged New England maiden, who has never looked at her philosophy from its practical or humorous side.