Excerpt from Mistress and Maid: A Household Story She was a rather tall, awkward, and strongly-built girl of about fifteen. This was the first impression the maid gave to her mistresses, the Misses Leaf, when she enter ed their kitchen accompanied by her mother, a widow and washerwoman, by name Mrs. Hand. I must confess, when they saw the damsel, the ladies felt a certain twinge of doubt as to whether they had not been rash in offering to take her; whether it would not have been wiser to have gone on in their old way - now, alas! Grown into a very old way, so as almost to make them forget they had ever had any other - and done without a servant still. Many consultations had the three sisters held before such a revolutionary extravagance was determined on. But Miss Leaf was beginning both to look and to feel not so young as she had been Miss Selina ditto; though, being still under forty, she would not have acknowledged it for the world. And Miss Hilary, young, bright and ao tive as she was, could by no possibility do every thing that was to be done in the little establishment; be, for instance, in three places at once - in the school-room teaching little boys and girls, in the kitchen cooking dinner, and in the rooms up stairs busy at house-maid's work. Besides, much of her time was spent in waiting upon poor Selina, who frequently was, or fancied herself, too ill to take any part in either the school or house duties. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.