Page:Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope.djvu/345

as surprised at the sight of a deal table, rush-bottomed chairs, cheese put on first and a pudding in a copper dish after it, with other anomalies that would have made even a third-rate Brummell shudder. But the occasions for eating in the European way in Lady Hester's house occurred very rarely, and the servants, who were habituated to Turkish usages or to the mongrel service of some Levantine dragoman, had no notions of the regulations of an English table. In my own house, I had two tolerably well-trained boys; but there was an interdict against their ever crossing the threshold of Lady Hester's gate, in order that no information of what was going on within her walls should be carried out to the female part of my family. In the most common concerns, Lady Hester's servants made much bustle and did little. They ran in different directions, jostled and crossed each other half a dozen at a time for the same thing, entirely reversing one of her favourite maxims, that everything in a great person's house should be done as if by magic, and nobody should know who it was set it a going. These servants had but one spring of action, and that was the bakshysh, or present, which they all looked for on the departure of a stranger. It was a painful thought to me, as these gentlemen left the gate, that, when they were about to mount their horses, the mercenary spirit of such a set of varlets might be charged to the connivance of the mistress.