changed her domestics, "preferring" (we quote the words of an admirable mistress of a family) "the trouble of dismissing her servants' faults to the pain and manifold disadvantage of dismissing them." She bore in mind that they were the weak and neglected children of the great family, doomed by circumstances to be wanderers and aliens, and subject to wrong biases and bad influences. She was patient and long suffering with them, willing to forbear, to toil, and wait, if, in the touching language of Scripture, she might "thereby save a brother."
About the time of Lucy's entrance into the family, there had been a general change of operatives, and none of those long proved remained save Clara Lane, better known by her alias of "mammy." Davis, Mrs. Hyde's man, had served her for fourteen years, and continued to perform his humble duties accurately, after the avails of his industry, fortunately invested by Mr. Hyde, amounted to three thousand dollars.[1]
- ↑ As I wish to avoid the imputation of exaggeration, I venture to state a corresponding fact in the family of a gentleman, by birth, education, and station one of the first men in Massachusetts. I chanced to be dining at this house, when he said to his wife (we had just returned from a drive to Mount Auburn), "How do you like your new horses?" "Mine!—you surely have not brought them?—we do not want them." "No, not exactly, but Horace" (the coachman) "took such a fancy to them I could not deny him." On making some inquiries about the domestic thus indulged, I found he had served the family some twenty years; that he was worth between 6 and 7,000 dollars; that he was a colonel in the militia; and that, at public dinners in Boston on gala days, he took precedence of his employer and his employer's son, both men of the first consideration in the city. He waited at table with perfect respectfulness and propriety. Of course his attachment to the family alone retained him in their service. Is not this instance worth a volume of speculation upon the possible happiness of domestic service and the exercise of the virtues in the relation of employers and employed? We trespass so far upon private correspondence as to insert here a tribute to American domestics, contained in a letter written by Mrs. Butler after her recent departure for England. "I left all my own household crying, and entreating to return to me whenever I returned; and do you know my heart smote me so dreadfully for what I had said about American servants, that I felt as if I must turn round on the threshold of my own door and beg all their pardons." It must be remembered to the honour of employer and employed in this case, that attachment, and not necessity, was the bond. Mrs. Butler's domestics could probably command fifty places on the day they left her house. Mrs. Butler's compunction was more generous than just, for, in her much-abused journal, she has given an unqualified testimony to the truth and integrity of American servants
