worried perpetually. She was incapable of believing that there could be any good in a servant, that there was any other side to a domestic save a seamy side. She could make no allowance for ignorance, for weakness, for lightheartedness. A servant in her eyes must be a drudge ever working, never speaking, smiling, taking a hand off the duster, without a mind above flue and tea-leaves, and unable to soar above a cobweb; with a temper perfect in endurance of daily, hourly fault-finding, nagging, grumbling, a mind unambitious also of commendation. Miss Trevisa held that every servant that a malign Providence had sent her was clumsy, insolent, slatternly, unmethodical, idle, wasteful, a gossip, a gad-about, a liar, a thief, was dainty, greedy, one of a cursed generation; and when in the Psalms, David launched out in denunciation of the enemies of the Lord, Miss Trevisa, when she heard or read these Psalms, thought of servantdom. Servants were referred to when David said, "Hide me from the insurrection of the wicked doers, who have whet their tongues like a sword, that they may privily shoot at him that is perfect," i.e., me, was Miss Trevisa's comment. "They encourage themselves in mischief; and commune among themselves how they may lay snares, and say, that no man shall see them." "And how," said Miss Trevisa, "can men be so blind as not to believe that the Bible is inspired when David hits the character of servants off to the life!"
And not the Psalms only, but the Prophets were full of servants' delinquencies. What were Tyre and Egypt but figures of servantdom shadowed before. What else did Isaiah lift up his testimony about, and Jeremiah lament over, but the iniquities of the kitchen and the servants' hall. Miss Trevisa read her Bible, and great comfort did it afford her, because it did denounce the servant maids so unsparingly and prepared brimstone and outer darkness for them.
Now Judith had seen and heard much of the way in which Miss Trevisa managed Captain Coppinger's house. Her room adjoined that of her aunt, and she knew that if her aunt were engaged on—it mattered not what absorbing work, embroidery, darning a stocking, reading a novel, saying her prayers, studying the cookery book—if a servant sneezed within a hundred yards, or upset a drop of water, or clanked a dust-pan, or clicked a door-
