Date: 1911-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Humor; Essays; Opinion
Description: Mrs. Murphy is a genial old charwoman and the very soul of wit. She gives her views on the “things that matter” with a delightful frankness, simplicity, sound sense, and shrewd humor. ~ ~ ~ ~ These pieces are taken from archives of Pearson’s Magazine. This delicious quote from the first installment certainly whets the appetite: Mrs Murphy on honesty: “Use it with discretion, same as I have done, and don’t make too much of a hobby of it, and you won’t go far wrong.” ~ ~ ~ ~ Barry Eric Odell Pain (28 Sep. 1864 – 05 May 1928) was an English journalist, poet, humorist and writer. During his lifeti
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain where copyright is “Life+90” or less, and in the USA

MRS. MURPHY

The Charwoman’s
Point of View…

BARRY PAIN

MobileRead Edition
2022

Mrs. Murphy is a genial old charwoman and the very soul of wit. She gives her views on the “things that matter” with a delightful frankness, simplicity, sound sense, and shrewd humor.

These pieces are taken from archives of Pearson’s Magazine. This delicious quote from the first installment certainly whets the appetite:
Mrs. Murphy on honesty:
“Use it with discretion, same as I have done, and don’t make too much of a hobby of it, and you won’t go far wrong.”

Barry Eric Odell Pain (28 Sep. 1864 – 05 May 1928) was an English journalist, poet, humorist and writer. During his lifetime, he was perhaps best known as a writer of parody and lightly humorous stories, but now is also noted for his tales touched with fantasy, horror, and the supernatural. He also wrote stories of mystery and suspense. His humor has been characterized by some modern critics as “a surreal forerunner to Monty Python.”

These pieces by Barry Pain (1864–1928), illustrated by Reginald F. Smith (1855–1925), first appeared in Pearson’s Magazine Jun. 1912 – May 1913. This book is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+90” or less, and in the USA.

CONTENTS:

- On Honesty
- On Love and Marriage
- On Respect
- On Work
- On Temper
- On Charity
- On Accidents
- On Popularity
- On Experience
- On Health
- On Saving
- On Fate

MRS. MURPHY

The Charwoman’s
Point of View…

ON HONESTY

If you goes out to work at houses, same as I does, and you happens to have a basket, you burn it. Leastwise, leave it at home. For if you takes it to the place where you’re working you’re making trouble for yourself. A charwoman what carries a basket ain’t popular, and only attracts attention.

I remember what happened when I were a deal younger nor what I am now. I was but fifty-four then, and sent for sudden to a job at the “Sycamores”, where I’d never been afore. I takes my basket and off I goes. I does my work, and were just starting back when up sails her ladyship with her chin stuck out. She were titled, though not born to it, nor looking it neither.

“I wish to see what you’ve got in your basket,” says she.

So I took and showed her what I’d got. It were my apron, and the key of my door, and my teeth, what I only wears for meals, waste not being a fault of mine.

“Which of these is yours?” says I.

“Don’t address me in that way,” says her majesty. “I merely wished to know. I have had things taken out of my house before by dishonest charwomen.”

“And I hope you may again,” I says. “Good- bye, ducky. Take care of yourself.”

And with that I leaves her.

No, I hadn’t got nothing of hers in my basket. And all I’d got in the pocket under my skirt was a bit of bacon as were too corner- wise for the dining-room rashers, a few potatoes, half a bar of soap, and a box of matches. And most of that had been give me by the cook.

I never took no basket with me after that, not when I were going out to work. It puts ideas into the lady’s head, and leads to unpleasantness. I’ve had to take the rough with the smooth all my life; but suspiciousness is just one of them things as I can’t stick. Never could. No honest woman could. Besides, if the pocket under your skirt’s large enough, you don’t need no basket.

Yes, I’m honest according to my views. And if the lady ain’t got the same views, then that’s her misfortune. Just look into it for yourself.

Suppose I was to find a diamond tarara when I were doing out the scullery—-I ain’t never found none yet, but you never knows your luck—what should I do? I should up and take that tarara to her ladyship in once. Shouldn’t even stop to wipe my hands and adjust my toilette. There you are. Property worth hundreds, and give back instantaneous by a poor woman out for two-and-a-kick and her dinner.

I’ve thought that out, and it’s right every way. It puts your character right for all time, and the meanest lady as ever stepped couldn’t shed less than a sovereign for a tarara come back. And what else are you to do? A nice old sight I should look, round at my uncle’s, and asking for fifty on a diamond tarara. Six months with the usual bonus is about what I should get. Not for me, thank you. I comes of a family what has kept theirselves respectable.

But when the cook gives you a trifle, that’s a different thing altogether. It’s my duty to do what the cook says, and act respectful. If she says: “Hand me this here, Mrs. Murphy,” then I hands it. If she says: “Reach me that there,” then I reaches. And if she trims a chop off of the end of the loin afore she puts it in, and says I can fry that for my supper, then I borrows a bit of last week’s paper to wrap it in.

And I’m right again, and I knows it. It’s the lady herself as has given me that chop, acting through the cook, which is her agent. She mayn’t know it, and maybe she wouldn’t like it if she did, but there it is just the same. That’s the law of this land, and I ain’t making no mistake about it, for I got it from a solicitor’s clerk what lodged with us in brighter days. And a fine upstanding gentleman he was— doing time now, poor chap.

There’s a motto as should be chalked up in letters of gold over the bed of every charwoman. And the words of it is, “Keep in with the cook.” If she speaks of her rich relatives with the motorcar, keep your temper and listen for all the world as if you believed it. When she tells you what they said about her looks when she were a girl, tell her they might say the same to-day, and not be so far out. When she starts on the men what she might have married, but wouldn’t, don’t let yourself go. And if she shows you her new hat, break out into a cold sweat over the marvel of it at the price. Kind words is a good investment, as the hymn says. And so you’ll think next morning when you warms up them cold sausages for your breakfast.

I’m not saying as it was the cook as give me that bit of soap and the box of matches. There’s many a woman as will leave soap in the water to waste. That’s a thing I never did in my life. And what I saves I has a right to half a bar of now and again. As for the matches, matches is cheap enough. It would be a measly sort of lady as would make a song over a box of matches. I acts on principle, and I has what matches I requires, and I ain’t bought a box for the last eighteen years, and I ain’t going to begin now.

If no lady never comes across no worse sort nor what I am, then she’s lucky.

But I do remember one time when I were suspected wrongful, and never spoke back, nor nothing. And why? Because I’m one as can make allowances where reasonable. For one thing, the party in question were a young couple, hardly old enough to blow their own noses, and had just started housekeeping. And then, again, I’d been recommended to them by the parson’s wife, and we all knows what that is. Mostly, the parson’s wife recommends them as has been brought to see the error of it, and is wishful to make a fresh start. All right as far as it goes. She’s got to back her husband up in his business, same as any other woman. Still, anybody taking anybody on what I calls a rectory character, so to speak, naturally counts the spoons and tries the cupboard where the decanters is kept to see if it’s really locked. You’ve got to look after yourself in this world. And though nothing of the kind in my case, how was that young couple to know?

The first time they sent for me was when the housemaid were upset internal, which was put down to the new paint. That is a thing as may happen, a niece of my own being one as the smell of new paint is death to, as she’s proved more than once. However, cook asked me to take a cup of tea up to that suffering house- maid, so I see the girl myself, and what was the matter with her were not paint. Oh, no! And it didn’t take me two minutes to find out what her trouble really was. I were right, too. A week later she was sent out on the quick jump, with her box to follow per C.P., and they found the actual whisky bottles.

But that were nothing to do with me at the time. I were there to do her work, and start in on the breakfast-room, which I did. Soon as I come to the mantelshelf I see a silver shilling lying there. Now them as is used to doing out rooms knows when a thing has been put there, and when it’s been left there accidental. Ask me the difference, and there I confess you has me, for I couldn’t put it in words. All the same, I won’t never make a mistake about it. That shilling had been put deliberate, as I’d have swore to before a magistrate. So I ups with it and turns it over, and it were no surprise to me to find a small cross scratched left-hand of the lion.

To think of it—them two poor young Can terbury lambs trying to lay the marked-money trap for me as would be sixty-seven next quarter day! Simply look at it. Their cook ordered what she like from the tradesmen, and no weights was never checked. Their house- maid was making life one long beano. Smoking fags in the shed were the gardener’s principal work. They was done all round, them turtle- doves was. They could never have caught nobody at nothing. And there they was playing at being the C.I.D. along of me.

Well, you couldn’t be angry with them-—it were too heart-breaking. Made me smile, I can tell you. So to carry the fun on, I put that shilling under a bronze figure of Venus, or Gladstone, or some such person. Then I finishes off there, and hops down to the kitchen for my elevenses. I don’t want to drink better beer nor what they kept in that house.

Presently orders was brought me to go up to the breakfast-room, which was what I had expected. There they both was, a nice-looking couple, though nervous. She were pretending to read the paper, and not looking a bit like it. He’d been put up to do the talking, and were standing back to the fire and heartily ashamed of himself, which was to his credit. So I opens the ball by dropping my curtsy, which is old- fashioned but earns money.

“I say, Mrs. Murphy,” says he. “I left a shilling on the mantelpiece here this morning, and it seems to have gone. Do you know anything about it?”

“Yes, sir,” I says. “It’s still there. I slipped it under that little small bronze statute by your elbow, sir, out of sight, sir, and was meaning to have mentioned it. For it didn’t hardly look safe with the painter’s men coming and going. Of course, they may all be as respectable as the day, but sudden temptation is what finds out the sore point in the armour. And I’m sure I hope I haven’t done wrong, sir.”

Then she up and spoke, and very pleased with me she were. She said I were a most honest, intelligent, and careful woman. He said he only wished everybody who worked for him had got my common sense. Then they gave me the shilling, and said I deserved it.

Later in the day she brings out a pair of very handsome, showy vases. They’d been given them as a wedding present, but seemingly was not to their taste, and she asked me if I could do with them. So I thanked her warmly, and said they’d make my little home look very bright and gay. And so I dare say they would, if I hadn’t sold them that night for half-a-crown and a pie-dish, and believe now I ought to have got more.

And that were not all. Just as I were leaving they were turning out a nice bit of linoleum, as they’d bought, and then not fancied, and I could have it if I liked. So I did. What with them things, and a few trifles as cook had said I could take, I could hardly carry the stuff home.

I still works for that couple, but it ain’t the little gold mine here below what it used to be. It’s cocoa at eleven now, and all the extra I’ve had this last twice has been a pair of his old pyjamas. It’s a wonderful thing how much a girl picks up in a few months after she’s become a married woman.

Now don’t what I’ve told you go to show that the old proverb is right which says as honesty is the best policy? Use it with discretion, same as I have done, and don’t make too much of a hobby of it, and you won’t go far wrong.

ON LOVE AND MARRIAGE

When I were a girl of nineteen, in my first place, I were friends with the third daughter of the oil-and-colour at the corner. She never got married, nor was it to be expected, handicapped as she were with a glass eye through a gas-explosure, but her mind run a good deal on the subject of love. She used to know bits of poetry by heart—funny habits some people have—and would repeat them over to me, unless stopped and led on to more cheerful subjects. What that girl spent on Family Heralds, not to speak of books, was out of all keeping with her position in life.

Poor soul! Ten years later she put on flesh something alarming and her health give. She had to be took to the hospital, and even there they couldn’t say what she died of. The doctors did examine her internals, but couldn’t find nothing to please them, It’s my belief that it were nothing but a chill as had struck inwards and left no trace. Anyhow, be that as it may, there you are. That were a girl as spent her spare time thinking and dreaming about love, and reading of stories and poetry about it—and when she come to die, what did she really know about it? Nothing. Absolute nix.

Love’s like London. You don’t really know nothing about it unless you’ve been there, and, what’s more, been there some time.

Suppose, now, you lived in India or some of them wild parts, and had lived there all your life. Books might be sent to you about London, all done out with pictures, and you might study of them and learn a bit. But you’d never get the real thing—not like you gets when you catches that niff of hot vinegar in Soho in the pickle season, or when you exchanges words with a free-thoughter in Hyde Park of a Sunday afternoon—which I’ve done myself, and not got the worst of it, neither—or when you does your shopping off of the barrows of a Saturday night. That’s the sort of thing as makes you understand London.

Same way with love—if you ain’t been there, you can’t properly know. It’s not to be expected. Love’s the popularest game on earth, but it ain’t got no rules. Takes different folks different ways, if you catches my meaning.

I knowed one young girl as worked at a laundry. The first time a man asked her if she loved him—sitting at their teas of a Sunday afternoon, they was—it give her such cramp in the muscles of her back that she were no use with a flat-iron for two days afterwards.

Love? It gets a girl in service at twenty a year, and makes her spend twenty-five, mostly on adorning of herself, the rest being packets of fags and such-like for the man. It gets another girl with no more wages and makes her put by a golden sovereign in the Post Office every month.

For the matter of six weeks I cleaned for a cheap-line photographer off of the Edgware Road, and the gent himself said to me: “Mrs. Murphy,” he said, “if it wasn’t for the sweethearting, us photographers couldn’t live.” True words they was, too. Love will make a man what lost half his face in a railway go and get his picture took.

Many has been drove to drink by love, and many has been froze off it similar. My old friend, Mrs. Budd, has told me with tears in her eyes how her husband signed off it for her sake. It only turned out to be temporary, but it don’t do to expect too much here below, and she ain’t what you’d call bigoted about a drink for herself, though always within bounds.

Well, that’s how it is with love—you never know which way it’s going to break. It’s like a sort of force as may blow the kitchen boiler through your drawing-room windows and lift the roof off, or it may turn into the electric light and brighten your happy home for years. In my experience, though not laying down no law for others, I should say as it were mostly boiler.

•   •   •   •   •   •

Yes, I were engaged regular five times afore I was twenty-six, and then went and married the wrong man. It were mostly done to spite a friend of mine, but I suppose I must have seen a something or other in him. Upon my soul, I think there’s some girls as ought to be kept on the chain, to save them from doing theirselves a injury. I were that kind of girl, and that’s how I become Mrs. Arthur Eggat.

He’d got a nasty, measly. whining kind of temper as used to drive me near frantic, and for meanness you wouldn’t find his match in a hurry. Why, when he died, which he didn’t do for eleven years, it was because he would eat something as ought to have been throwed away. Otherwise, he were a good man, looked after the children, attended chapel regular, and left me a sight better off nor what I am now. A man like that would have been a lesson to some people, but it was as if I couldn’t learn nothing.

I hadn’t had but five months’ holiday after putting Eggat in Kensal Green when I made my second mistake, which was Murphy. How any woman with the sense that I has now could ever have been the fool what I was then is a fair conundrum. He took all I’d got, did Jim Murphy, and he mistreated me cruel when in liquor, which were whenever he could get it. He left me three times, but always came back. A lazier man never stepped, unless the fancy took him, as did happen sometimes. I’ve knowed him to work through the whole of a August Bank Holiday, though the month as followed were no treat. His line were the cabinet-making, and he were known to be clever at it when he could be brought to take a interest. Well, so things went on till I were fifty-one, and then one winter his lungs got pneumatic, and that finished him.

Since then I’ve enjoyed my widowhood, and I’m going on for sixty-nine. I buried four children, and I’ve got three sons doing well in Canada. They all three sends me home nothing a week regular as the clock. Takes after their dear father, they does. If I wants money I’ve still got to scratch around and earn it. Well, there’s my record for you—that’s what love has done for me, and if I’m a living testimonial I don’t look it.

Daresay I shall be told as I brought it all on myself. The world’s full of people what has brought things on theirselves, and it’s very enjoyable to remind them of it.

Suppose I were to start life again with my present experience, I shouldn’t make them mistakes again; I should make another set as near like them as no matter. That’s where it is. Love’s a thing where experience don’t help you, and the best advice is no more good than a sick headache.

When a girl’s in love with a man, nothing he does is wrong. If he stole a penny from a blind man and bought poison for his mother with it, she’d say it was only his high spirits, and she made no doubt there were faults on both sides. Contrarywise, if a girl ain’t in love with the man what’s after her, then nothing he does is right. If she were told that he’d risked his life to save a child from drowning, she’d only turn sniffy and say she hated all that self-advertising.

Many a woman puts a sight more brain-work into choosing her hat than she ever did into choosing her husband. A girl in love ain’t in no fit state to judge, and the man in love ain’t no better. And being dotty as I says, they shoves up the banns and gets sentenced for life. It’s a marvel to me as there ain’t more accidents. Shows you can get used to anything, don’t it?

Then again, it’s a bit of luck that women has a forgiving nature. Women is better at forgiving than men is; they gets more practice. There’s been wonderful instances. I remember in my young days I went housemaid to a lady as I’d put down for a widow. Nice house outside Wimbledon, as were less built over then nor it is now.

Almost the first thing I noticed was as there were neither lock nor bolt to the front door. It were not safe, as I told the cook, and I asked her if she wouldn’t speak about it. She put me off at the time, saying as no burglar ever thought of trying the front door, but later I got the whole story out of her. That poor lady weren’t no widow. She’d been deserted by her husband four years before. Since then, she had always expected him to come back to her. And whatever hour of the day or night it might be, he was to find the house open to him.

I’ve done a bit of forgiving myself—Murphy used to keep me busy at it—but I never reached that class. To my mind the poor lady went too far. Forgiveness is all very well, but you don’t want to put no premium on that kind of thing.

Pride’s another thing as helps to keep the home together. When I were a little girl at the Sunday-school, I were taught as pride were a sin. Maybe it is. But if you tell a man he ain’t got none you’re likely to get a rough answer. Fact is, we’ve all got a bit. We none of us wants our neighbours to know everything about us. If you has a misfortune in the family, that’s bad enough without having a lot of acquaintances sympathising and looking down on you. Why, just at first, Murphy himself would never go to no pawnbroker’s nor let me go neither. He’d give an old woman twopence to take the things for us. Later on he weren’t so particular, and towards the end there weren’t nothing to take.

Yes, pride has its uses. It’s kept many a man out of prison. And, as I says, it’s kept many a couple together as would otherwise have chucked it. A man thinks he is going to marry a angel with a gift for cooking, and finds out later as he’s got nothing but a woman with a peppery temper, as is for everlasting telling him what he’d better do next. The woman thinks she’s picked a winner, and finds she’s only married one of the also-ran. Well, if they has any pride, they don’t run bleating about their disappointments all round the place. They gets used to it gradual. There’s a bit of give-and-take, the woman doing most of the giving, and things shake down.

But, of course, when the kids come along, that’s the best safeguard of the lot. When two people is interested in the same business, they can’t afford to quarrel. Leastwise, not permanent, as a general rule. Some few is booked for a bust-up whatever happens.

What we’ve got to look at is the voice of experience. This here world has been going on for—well, ever since it started. And there’s no doubt we’ve done a lot in the time in the way of alterations and improvements. But we ain’t made no change in love, and people is getting married just as per usual. That shows as it’s one of the things as has got to be.

I’ve heard some women say as they didn’t want nothing to do with love. They hated all men, and they wanted the vote. Well, such talk is a harmless kind of gas-escape. If it means anything, which as a rule it don’t, it means as they ain’t got the full fifty-two cards in their pack, and is a object for pity according.

On the other hand, there’s plenty of poetry-books and such as goes too far the other way. Love ain’t everything. It’s got to leave a man time for his meals and time to earn them. There’s a few things to do outside of love-making. And what’s the use of talking about loving of a girl forever till the sea gives up its dead? Love don’t last forever. It lasts for the run of the piece. And that is as it may be, and different in different cases.

Love’s a thing as has got to be. You’ve got to be in it. Very like, you’re in it already. Well, I wishes you better luck nor ever I had myself.

•   •   •   •   •   •
•   •   •   •   •   •

ON RESPECT

If I was to pay the same price for things what ladies does, I couldn’t live. I gets as good, sometimes better, and pays about half. And if you think it’s because the shops likes my pretty face and winning ways, you’re mistook. It’s a matter of business.

When a lady buys a thing, she pays half for the thing and half for the extras. She don’t go to the shops, but the shops has to come to her every morning on carts. That’s extra. If she runs out of stamps or wants a cheque cashed, the grocer has got to oblige. Extra again. Every man and boy in his employ has to touch his cap to the lady whenever he gets the chance. And if by accident she do ever go into the shop, the boss himself is ready to lie on his stomach and bump his head in the sawdust to show his respectfulness. Extra all the time. It’s all got to be paid for.

That’s where it is. I don’t pay for no respect, and I don’t get none. They knows me at the place where I gets my little bit of meat on a Saturday night. They knows they can’t do me. They have tried and give it up. When I looks in the chap calls out: “Oh, here we are again! And how much do you want for nothing this time?” No, I don’t get no respect. But I gets a good Sunday dinner for threepence to fourpence-halfpenny, and that’s more than my lady can do.

And, mark you, here’s where the trouble comes in, as the gas escape said to the candle. Them as do pay for respect don’t get none neither. True as death, they don’t. They only gets the imitation.

You ever heard about Mr. Bamford Pratt and the crossing-sweeper? I had it from a friend of mine as were in service in the neighbourhood at the time. Bamford Pratt were one of them justice-of-the-Peaceses. He’d a very good house, and he went to a very good business every morning. Close by the station an old crossing-sweeper had his pitch. Of course, he didn’t actual sweep the crossing—none of them does, for it’s done local and goes on the rates—but he waggled his old broom and was most respectful.

Every morning he give Bamford Pratt the military salute and every evening the same. Pratt weren’t a officer, not even to look at. He stood five-two, wore side whiskers, and were mostly waistcoat. But he paid his guinea regular to the rifle-range, and one of his clerks had been in the C.l.V., and he’d had his view of the procession blocked out by a busby. So perhaps he felt sort of mixed up with the army. Anyhow, he liked that old man’s respectful attention. Worth sixpence to a shilling a week to that crossing-sweeper were Mr. Bamford Pratt.

And so it went on for a matter of two year or more. One fine morning Mr. Pratt come down to the station as usual, and there were the same old salute waiting for him.

“Nice day, my man,” says Pratt, feeling for his small change.

“Beautiful morning, captain. Thank you very much, captain.”

That very same evening as Bamford Pratt got out of the train, either he run into somebody or somebody run into him. Anyhow, the other man spoke first.

What he said was: “Now then, you silly fathead, look where you’re going.” And that other man were the nice respectful old crossing-sweeper.

Yes, it were just as you suppose. While Bamford Pratt were away in the City, the sweeper had sold his pitch to another chap. Bamford Pratt were nothing to him no more, and he’d no need to respect him, and he didn’t. And all as Bamford Pratt gives to crossing-sweepers nowadays you could put in your eye without setting up of a irritation.

Houses where I work sometimes sends me to fetch a taxi off of the rank, and a very haughty pick-and-choose lot them taxi men is. It’s “Where’s it to, my old dear?” And if they don’t like it, they tells you the machinery has come unstuck, and you can’t prove nothing, not being trained to it. But there were one of them chaps as I did have a bit of friendly talk with—me having sewed a button on for him. That man had got the whole thing ruled out and he give it away to me.

If a fare paid him no more than what was on the clock, he’d shout out: “If you can’t afford cabs you should take the bus.” If he got twopence over, he said nothing. If it were threepence or fourpence, he’d say “Thank you.” And if it were sixpence, he’d say, “Thank you very much, sir. Good-morning, sir.”

“Well,” I says, “suppose your gent tipped you a shilling.”

“Ah,” says he, “then I should know as I’d got the absolute mug, and I should have another sixpence out of him, owing to the rise in petrol.”

Made me laugh at the time, that did. But what’s it all go to show? Why, what I said. You can’t buy respect. You can do without it, same as I does myself. Or you can buy a lot of humbug, same as most does if they’ve got the money to pay for it. But if you wants respect, you’ve got to earn it, and that takes a bit of doing.

But I’ve seen it done myself, as I’ll tell you. Twenty years or so ago, Bank Holiday up on the Heath weren’t the holy Sunday-school here below what it is now. It’s improved terrible. There was more pubs then, and more booze, and things was fairly rough.

I was setting up there on the grass, edge of a slope, one August Monday. Alongside me were a young girl what worked at a dressmaker’s. Nice quiet little thing she looked, if you didn’t happen to notice her eyes. I’d never seen her in my life afore, but we’d got into talk, same as one does. Well, setting there, I see a young fellow lay out two big ones in less time than it takes to talk about it. Them big roughs was full of beer and glory, and they’d started interfering with the young chap’s girl—she having got a few steps ahead of him in the crowd. He come up and spoke, and they asked him if he wanted a thick ear.

He were not what I should call handsome in the face, that young chap, but he were precious hard stuff, and he moved in flashes. Next thing I knew, the first of them roughs had gone downy with an almighty one on the point, which were all the medicine he wanted for one afternoon. Same moment the other rough—dirty dog that he was—come at the lad from behind. I just sung out in time. The young chap swung round, caught him by the rising foot, and lifted it on. And number two did mixed circles down hill for twenty yards into a furze bush. Pretty to look at it was, though soon over. More like fireworks than fighting.

Just then I felt a grip on my arm fit to break it, and that quiet girl says to me excited like: “I’d kiss that man’s boots!”

I told her not to talk so silly, but I’d no time for her, for just then up come the slop. Me and the crowd explained the thing to him, and a fairer-minded policeman I never wish to meet. It were all right, and nobody were charged.

Well, there you are. That chap had got respect—and perhaps a bit over. It were the genuine thing, and all the money in the world won’t buy it. But, mind you, that’s no cause to make the paupers sing hallelujah, for all the poverty in the world won’t get it neither. Rich or poor, if you wants the real thing you’ve got to earn it out of yourself. And I speaks impartial, for I’ve been in this world close on sixty-nine years, and nobody’s ever respected me yet except myself. And I’ve had my doubts about it, too, sometimes.

But you may take it from me that self-respect’s a fine thing. Some of them what’s got it seems to be easy satisfied. Very likely. I’ve noticed it myself. But it’s a fine thing all the same, for nobody what’s got it ever goes as low as he’d like to. It claps on the break on particular occasions.

Why, my old man, Murphy, had touches of it. When he wanted something on my first husband’s case of humming-birds, he wouldn’t take it there himself, but sent it by a woman as did such jobs. And when things came to the worst, he’d never let me pop my wedding ring, though I’d have been glad to. You can’t eat rings. But he’d have bashed my face in if I’d as much as spoken of it. I don’t say, of course, as he’d got perfect self-respect. But he’d got some of it. And the longer I lives the more I sees as you can’t have everything.

I never give way to much reading, not like some does; but when I worked up at the rectory, the lady there made a hobby of reading pieces out to you if she thought they’d do you good. And of course I used to humour her. Well, one bit as she read said that if you’d only got self-respect you could do without the respect of others. As she seemed rather to fancy it, of course I said nothing at the time, it not being my place to disagree with my employers about anything. But if ever I heard a silly remark, that were one. Might as well say that if you’ve only had your breakfast you can do without your dinner. Of course you can—as I know, for I’ve had to do it in my time. But the point ain’t that you can; the point is that you’d rather not.

Self-respect’s a fine thing, as I said just now, but it ain’t everything. If you’re twenty-two carat, and knows it, that may be a consolation if nobody else believes it. But you’d a sight sooner the rest was as sure of your quality as you was yourself. Stands to reason. I never see much use in exaggeration—except, maybe, when the lady who ain’t engaging you asks what your bus fare come to, and even then I’d sooner charge it to time.

Take the case of that lady at the rectory herself. She respected herself, and I will say for her that she had a right so to do. She’d got herself in hand as few has. I’ve seen her break her shoelace and miss her train, and never a word said as you mightn’t have sung in church. She did a deal of good, too, to them as could stick it. Of course some couldn’t, but I could. I’ve been married twice—wrong man both times—and patience is become second nature to me.

I’ve knowed several hundred pleasanter women than that lady, but none holler. But, having self-respect, do you think she was doing without the respect of others? Not she! She enjoyed it. Why, it were that old-fashioned curtsey of mine as got me my first job there. When she showed her plain face round the kitchen door, any of us as were sitting had to stand on our two feet, and stop so till she went. She had it all round. I’ve seen a Wesleyan milkman,what she never dealt with, touch his hat to her. Hot stuff, she was!

Ah, well, it’s a funny thing how we all cling to it, ain’t it? I shouldn’t wonder myself if that were one of the reasons why so many people keeps a dog. A dog will show fondness for you, and respect you, and do what he’s told, when you can’t get the same from no human being. You may be old and ugly, you may be broke, you may be friendless, you may be drunk and disgraceful, you may be as bad as they make them, but your own dog will always treat you as if you was something extra special. They don’t know, dogs don’t, and it’s my belief they wouldn’t act no different if they did.

I comes of a family as were always respected in moderation, but I’ve gone down in the world. Matter of fact, I’ve sometimes thought of keeping a dog myself. I’ve had my chance. Houses where I work there’s sometimes one pup in the litter as ain’t up to standard, and I could have it for the asking. I could do with a small dog, too—one as didn’t eat too much.

But then, how am I to pay the license? That’s where I’ve always stuck.

•   •   •   •   •   •
•   •   •   •   •   •

ON WORK

You go along to any of the houses where I’ve been engaged, and ask the ladies what they thinks about me. Some will tell you one thing, and some will tell you another. Them as I’ve been able to get on with will say as I’m most respectful. Them as I couldn’t stick, will say as I’m most insulting—and not so far out neither, so far as they knows. But if they speaks the truth, they’ll all have to own as I’m a worker. So I am. I enjoys work. I wallows in it. There ain’t a morning when I don’t want to start in on something or other.

The trouble with me is as sometimes I ain’t got no job to go to. Seems to come and go in waves like. Last Monday I could have had a whole day at three different houses, if so be as I could have divided myself up. This Monday there were nothing but the steps at No. 48, as is but a flea-bite to a active woman, and paid according.

Regular work would be a luxury to me, but I suppose as I can’t expect it at my time of life. Sixty-nine is what I shall be next birthday, and fifty-one is what I always owns to if asked by the lady. (And what would she think if I asked her what her age were? Oh, she’d be highly pleased, I don’t suppose.) And it’s nothing but a prejudice when all’s said and done. For them as knows me knows as I can do a day’s work even now, with my old-age pension in sight, as would give most girls of twenty the palps of the heart.

I were doing out a box-room the other day when the housemaid looked in. A pretty young slip of a girl, she was. “Why, Mrs. Murphy,” says she, “you ain’t going to try to lift that great trunk, are you?”

“Lift it?” I says. “Why, of course I am. I’d lift it with you inside of it.”

She laughed, and said as she’d lay me sixpence I couldn’t.

“Come along, then,” says I. So she got in, and I closed the lid down and hoisted the whole thing up. And as I were doing it in sailed the lady of the house.

“Do you know where Mary is?” says the lady. “I’m looking for her.” Mary were the name of that housemaid.

“Afraid I can’t say, mum,” says I. “But she were here only a minute ago.” And every word of that were the gospel truth. I always prefers the truth if I can make it do. So off went the lady, and out hopped Mary, giggling the way girls will. But she paid me my sixpence all fair and square, and I took the bus home that night instead of walking, and had a pint of stout to my dinner on the Sunday.

But there are plenty as strong as I am, or stronger, what ain’t got my appetite for work. There’s some as will put up with it occasional, but don’t seem to care to make no habit of it. My late husband were one of that sort. More than once I’ve heard him say, when he got up in the morning, as he felt as if he could do a day’s work and enjoy it; but by bad luck that were always on a Sunday, when there weren’t none to do. And by next day, like as not, the feeling had passed off.

Some women is much the same, though mostly with better excuse. There was a job cook as I knowed. As a matter of course, she’d a first rate character, for the best registries won’t keep no jobbers on their books without it. She were a thorough good cook, too. I don’t suppose there were a house where she went to where they didn’t try to tempt her to stop with them. But it was never no use.

“What?” she says to me. “Me work fifty weeks in the year. No thank you. One week’s rest to four weeks’ work is my motto.”

And you couldn’t exactly blame her. Pound a week and all in were the least as she ever went out for; thirty shillings was frequent; and she had touched two pounds when the luck were with her. So she could afford it, especially as she had no one to think of but herself. She hadn’t got no husband to support, same as I had.

Still, things do seem to be arranged in a cock-eyed sort of way, when one woman has regular work simply thrown at her and won’t touch it, while I’m crying for the same and has to put up with chance jobs. Looks as if any woman can have anything, provided as she don’t want it.

My eldest boy, I remember, were always funny about work. You couldn’t call him idle, for morning till night he were always at something or other, but it were never what he’d got to do. No work come amiss to him except his own. He were like that, and you couldn’t strap it out of him.

When he were at school, he always did his lesson, but it were always the wrong lesson. Tell him to chop wood, and he’d mend your kettle. Ask him to kindly mend the kettle, and he’d paint and grain the front door, or stuff a dead canary to oblige a neighbour. Clever with his hands he was, and picked up the tricks of more than one trade, but never no sort of satisfaction.

He went out to Canada to work on the railway, and had the job waiting for him; and I should say as that railway is about the only thing in Canada as he’s never tried his hand at. Last I heard from him, he were employed at a drug store, and doing well. And what made him take that on I can’t say, for as a boy the only way we could get him to take medicine was to give it to his brother. Heaven help them as deals with him. But that were years and years ago, and he may have tried fifty other things since then. I never knowed him to stick to nothing. except once a chair as his father had new varnished.

And what is work, when you come to think about it? If my late husband had asked me that question, I should have told him to try some and then he’d know. But I’ve done work enough for two in my time, and I’m none so sure that I know myself. Same thing may be work to one and not to another. A day’s cricket is a day’s play to a boy, but it’s a day’s work to a pro. It ain’t so much the doing of a thing as people can’t stick; it’s the having got to do it. That’s the sort of feeling as makes old gents run to catch a Tube train, as is generally brought in heart-failure at the inquest. There’s another train in a minute, and it wouldn’t hurt them to wait six; it’s the having got to wait as makes them that impatient.

Of course, some gets put off their work on a matter of principle. That’s called a strike, and I’ve seen many of them. I’ve seen strikes of pretty well everybody except the charwomen—nice lot of old guys we should look if we was to come out, too. I’ve seen strikes, but I don’t understand them proper. First, one of the leaders gets up on a old box and he says: “Men, you’re slaves. Look what bacon’s up to. Cast your eye over the price of a spring cabbage. Everything’s raised except your wages. You’re being swindled and starved by the bloated capitalist. You ain’t got no living wage. Out you come for another penny a hour.” And out they comes. To prove as they can’t make a living by their work, they shows they’ve saved enough to take a holiday. The workman takes a few nice-sized stones and the belt with the heavy buckle, and goes out to do a job of peaceful picketing. Every sneak-thief in the place mixes in, for where there’s a fight there may be pickings. Every day trade slips away to the tune of thousands and thousands.

If you want a man to pay you more, first thing you do is to see as he has less money to do it with. So it goes on. By the time the pawnshops has all got the house-full boards out, the gent from the Board of Trade manages to patch something up. The employers give a little more than they wanted, and the men take a little less, and the newspapers says “Peace Restored,” and everybody seems very pleased. And what on earth they’ve got to be pleased about fairly beats me.

What happens? The employers is out of pocket by the loss of trade and increase of wages. They makes it good by putting up the price of their stuff against the general public. Hunt through the general public and you’ll find the chaps as sells the bacon and cabbages to them workmen, and you’ll find them putting up their prices in turn. Nobody takes a loss if he can help it; he passes it on to the next man. So there you are. The strikers have got a little extra money, but they’ve put up the prices against theirselves in doing of at. Maybe, there’s more in it than I can see. If there ain’t, strikes is foolishness.

The other day, when I were at work in a house, I happened to have a bit of talk with a young chap what had come about the electric bells, and he told me a thing about Edison. You may know the name. Seems he invented everything. When this Edison were a boy he were working in a telegraph office at some job as were not to his fancy. So instead of doing of it,he thought out some kind of electric jigger as would do it for him. You see, that’s where the head-work comes in. That’s the work as pays. That young solicitor gentleman as lodged with us in brighter days once said to me: “Mrs. Eggat,” he said—for it were in my first husband’s time—“I can always count on my brains to bring me in money.” So they did, too, but in the end they brought money in as weren’t his, and so he were jugged, poor blighter!

Look at them doctors. Some of them at the top will make their three guineas in ten minutes, and not so much as a bottle of mixture given in with it. Hardly has to lift theirselves out of their easy-chairs to do it, and folks glad to pay the money. Look where you like, and you’ll find the money going where the brains is, or else where the luck is., And I never had neither. If I had, you wouldn’t have found me at the age of over sixty-eight washing up the things after dinners as other people have eaten, and glad to get the job.

Still, I works on, and them as don’t has no pity from me. There were my sister’s youngest, as called herself a house-parlourer, though the hardest work she could ever bring herself to do were the waving of her own blessed hair. Ladies wouldn’t keep her, and l couldn’t blame them. That girl had four places in six months. And then she met me accidental in the Edgware Road. “No luck, auntie,” said she. “Out of a berth again. Try as I will, I don’t seem able to find nothing as I can stick.”

“Ah,” says I.

“Matter of fact,” says she, “I’m rather glad than not to have met you this morning. For it did occur to me that, going about to different houses as you do, you might have heard of some place as would suit me.”

“Well,” I says,“you ain’t everybody’s money. But, as it happens, I’ve heard of just one place, and only one, as would suit you down to the ground.”

“You old dear!” says she, very smiling. “It’s always good luck to meet you, just half a mo’ while I find my pencil. I’ll take down the address and I’ll go straight on there from here. Now where did you say as I was to try?”

“Try Heaven,” I says.

And she wasn’t half angry neither. But she never went.

•   •   •   •   •   •
•   •   •   •   •   •

ON TEMPER

When through no fault of my own I has a morning off, as like as not I treats myself to the police-court. Of course, the seats is that uncomfortable you might almost be in church, but otherwise it just suits me. There’s nothing to pay, and that’s what I mostly spend on luxuries. There’s always something doing—one turn sharp after another and no waiting—and as like as not you will see some friends of yours what you never would have expected it of. It’s a poor heart that never rejoices.

I were there one July morning, and a beautiful day it was. The sun was shining. The sparrows outside were singing their songs of love. Even the policemen looked happy. The beak were a fair picture—a dear old white-haired gentleman, he were, with a fresh complexion and a kindly smile and a gentle word for every drunk as he give the option to. He didn’t look as if anything on earth could have upset him.

And then come a case in which I took a particular interest through knowing one of the parties. Yes, it were my old friend Mrs. Stunt, the laundress, what used to wash for the rectory when I worked there. She were charged with assaulting another lady, Mrs. Hopper, and no wonder neither. Considering the circs you couldn’t blame her.

You see, it was just the old, old story of a trade rivalry. Now when a woman gets away one of your customers by slandering of you, and then sneaks your clothesline to hang it out on, are you to take that sitting down? No, indeed. Not in a Christian country. Mrs. Stunt called to get her clothesline back and passed a few remarks, and that was how it begun. Well, as I said myself afterwards, if my hair had been the colour of Mrs. Hopper’s, I’d only have been too thankful to have lost a handful or so of it. And as for the discolourination of the eye, that were proved to be pure accident.

However, Mrs. Hopper put her cousin up to give evidence, and a very poor figure the girl cut, in my opinion. When she had finished, the magistrate says to Mrs. Stunt, in his consoling and encouraging way, “Now have you any questions to ask this witness?”

“Yes, your worship, thanking you kindly, I have,” says Mrs. Stunt. “She can’t have seen what happened, because site were never there at all.”

“A question, I said. Don’t make statements to me. Do you want to ask the witness any questions?”

“I do, indeed, sir, your honour, If I stood up in a public place and told lies like she’s been doing, I should expect to be struck dead.”

“That is not a question. It must be a question. Do you know what the word means ?”

“Yes, your worship. Seeing that she never got back from the Hat and Fiddle till half-past three—which have told me themselves they would sooner have her room than her custom—she couldn’t have been in the backyard of No. 14 at the time when—”

And then came the surprise of my life. So far that old gentleman on the bench had been as quiet and peaceable as some old pet lamb, and looked more fit to be running a Sunday-school treat than a police-court; and then all of a sudden he flared up. He clenched his fists. His eyes stuck three inches out of his head. He fair shouted. He give it to that poor woman all anyhow. He told her to hold her tongue and speak up. He accused her flat of not knowing the meaning of the simplest words. In fact, I don’t know what he didn’t say. Oh, he stuck at nothing.

And what was all the fury about? Just because she didn’t put it in the correct form, which is what might happen to anybody in the nervousness of giving a performance.

Yes, we all has tempers, even them as looks the least like it. And sometimes it is the smallest little trifle as will lift the cork out.

Otherwise, speaking for myself, it’s not etiquette for no charwoman to have no temper at all. Ladies may be in a temper with everybody. Cooks may be in a temper with everybody except the ladies—and they don’t stop there sometimes. But if you goes out for half-a-crown a day and your dinner, you are expected to leave your temper at home in the jewel-box on the grand piano in the north drawing-room. I have lost more nor one job by forgetting of that rule.

There were one house where I worked off and on for over a year, and I give satisfaction. There were never a hitch until they took and give that fat-headed eldest girl of theirs three months at a domestic training college. Now nobody’s going to learn all I know about my work in three months, and that fat-headed girl could never have learned nothing about anything in a hundred years. As soon as she come back home I knew there would he trouble. She started her interfering at once.

One morning she gave me a few kindly hints on how to scrub a floor. I suppose I’ve scrubbed about fifty million floors in my time, but I said nothing. A few days later I was cleaning a pair of her shoes, and I got some more advice from her.

“The commonest mistake, Mrs. Murphy,” she said, “is to use too much of the—er—blacklead.”

I controlled myself. If I could have told her just what I thought of her for a shilling. Poor though I am, I would have spent the money. All I said was, “Never uses no blacklead.”

“Then what do you use?” she says.

“Paralliti and breadcrumbs,” says I. And even then it might have gone off all right if the cook, who happened to he in the kitchen at the time, hadn’t made a noise like a bust pipe. As it was,I was told I could either apologise to Miss Fathead or be fired out. I were fired. It had to come sooner or later.

I can do with a lady who knows nothing about my work and don’t pretend to. I can do with a lady who really does know it, though naturally that keeps you more active. But I can’t stick being taught my business by a girl young enough to be my granddaughter, who knows about half nothing, and has got that muddled.

It takes different people different ways, temper does. When my second husband got took with a fit of it, he’d got to break something. Sometimes it were crockery. Sometimes it were furniture. Sometimes it were me. Towards the end it were mostly me, because there was nothing else left.

Folks what never married Murphy and become a widow afterwards, don’t understand what calm after the storm really means. Yet I don’t know that his temper wasn’t easier to put up with than my first husband’s. If he’d got to wait five minutes for his dinner, he got the sulks, and when he got the sulks it took the form of not speaking. If he wanted anything he pointed and expected me to pass it, which I never did. It would last the best part of a week sometimes.

Of course what he really needed was a good clip over the ear, but unfortunately I was too much of a lady in those days to give it to him. There ain’t many like him, for which we may be truly thankful. What I mean to say is, temper don’t generally drive men to say too little, it drives them to say too much.

The other day I saw a dust-cart standing in front of a house. It were one of them high-toned dust-carts with a sliding roof to it. Out come the dustman from the house with a great heavy bin of rubbish on his shoulders. He went up the short ladder and bent over the side of the cart to tip that rubbish in. It went in all right. So did he. Foot slipped or something. I saw him when he climbed out again. He came down his ladder, sat down on the bottom of it, and begun.

Until I heard him I thought I knew something about language. His were enough to have burnt a hole in the pavement. And while he was in the middle of it his horse moved on—afraid of its tail being scorched—the ladder came down, and over he went in the road. He looked all round. Then he took up his ladder and went off after his cart without another word. It were too much for him. He give up.

That’s pretty generally the way. When the thing gets too big, you don’t lose your temper. Most men—unless they’re parsons, and paid to be otherwise—swears when they break their bootlaces, but they don’t when they break their legs.

Temper’s just about the most crossways thing as I knows of. With anything else you can say whether you want it or not. Ask me if I want a golden sovereign, and I can tell you. Ask me if I want the appendicitis, and I knows the right answer. But with temper it’s different; for if you’ve got a temper you acts foolish, and if you’ve not got one, then you’re everybody’s doormat.

There’s no mistake about the foolishness. You cast over in your mind the last time as you got irritated and fair let yourself go. If you didn’t do or say something foolish, I’ll return you your money. When I gets out of bed the wrong side, and gives my lady a back-answer, I may enjoy it at the time, but it’s only foolishness. A charwoman at my time of life ain’t the whole world’s fancy, and she ain’t such a Carnegie that she can afford to quarrel with a job of work.

I’ve seen a cook up with a glass jug and throw it at the cat. Nobody hurt but the jug. And, as I said to her, if that had been her own jug she’d have been sorry for it afterwards. Temper has all the foolishness of a drunk and none of the fun.

But I’ve knowed just one lady as had no temper at all, and I can’t say as I envied her. Used to come into the kitchen in the morning, and if the cook had got time to attend to her, she’d be told what she could have to eat. Otherwise, she’d be sent out again. And the poor thing used to call that giving the orders. She were known to all the shops round about. Yes, indeed. When they see her coming they’d get out all the stuff as they daren’t even show to anybody else, and shove it off on her. She were a safe mark.

If you ain’t got no temper you get trod on.

So my tip to everybody is to have a temper, but to keep it. Never let it get out. Keep it down. Sit on it. And then you’ll get on in the world if you don’t bust a artery first.

•   •   •   •   •   •
•   •   •   •   •   •

ON CHARITY

Charity ain’t what it used to be. In the days when my mother were a girl the rich could give without putting no questions and the poor could ask without telling no lies. Leastwise, so she used to say. It ain’t so now. One side got too artful, so the other side got too careful.

The thing’s what they call organised nowadays—same as the post-office, and worse. Seems like as if you couldn’t get nothing without filling in of a form. You’ve got to state your sex, if known, age, present occupation, if married or in any other trouble, where vaccinated, Christian name, if any, and all such things as them. You lose half a day’s work thinking out the answers as seems most likely to please them, and then like as not it’s labour thrown away. A fortnight later they writes that they regrets to find on inquiry as your religion’s got the moth, and you ain’t eligible for the almshouse.

Then look at this habit of entering things up in a book.

Suppose you’ve lived as honest as is reasonable, worked hard, kept sober except on the special occasions, and done a friend a good turn when you could without hurting yourself.

Well, it’s all in your favour, but you’ve got to prove it. And you can’t just say, “See volume 7, page 146, about nine lines from the top.” Oh, no! There ain’t no record kept of things like them. But suppose a bloke gets jugged for losing his temper over a girl and acting according. That’s written out all right. That’s in the book. That’s for anybody to turn up as the fancy takes him. That’s up against the poor blighter for ever and ever and the extra extension. He’ll never get into no alms-house. He’s one of the undeserving, he is.

Of course, them Sufferingettes has worked very hard to make Holloway fashionable, but that don’t amount to nothing. They’re only amateurs, and everybody knows it. The man what’s been in for what he’s done has always got to pay afterwards for having been punished, and that don’t seem to me fair. I don’t believe in paying twice for nothing. Nor even once, if avoidable.

But, however, I strays from the subject, as the man said when he fell out of the balloon.

This here organising of charity cuts both ways. If it’s made the rich extra careful it’s made the poor extra artful. I’ve knowed cases.

There was my old friend Mrs. Bird. When I says friend all I means is as I met her in business—we used to pawn our things at the same place. I never did consider her to be my class at all. She passed away, poor creature, through too much lifting of the elbow, and so I’d sooner not say anything against her. Still, for deceitfulness she were champion gold cup at any show. I knowed her when she were living in one of those courts off the Lane, and she’d got three different religions all going at once then, and was making money out of every one of them. And look what she did to that lady as come round to read to her.

It’s a curious fact that I can’t remember that lady’s name. Try as I will, I can’t. I know that it began with a M. and I’m pretty sure it was Higgins. But we’ll let that pass.

As I was saying, the lady used to look in on Mrs. Bird and read to her and give her advice about cleanliness and keeping away from liquor, and suchlike. That had gone on for about a fortnight,and all Mrs. Bird had made out of it was a present of soap. And, as she said, you can’t eat soap, nor you can’t make tea with it, and it ain’t easy stuff to sell.

A neighbour of Mrs. Bird’s warned her as that lady had never given no money, and never would give none, and had views against begging. Most women would have turned it up, and next time the lady called would have told her the address where she could go and take her soap with her. But Mrs. Bird, she said as she’d give her one chance.

So she wrote a letter to her brother George, saying all manner of sweet things about the lady, and telling him it was no good to ask her to get the five shillings out of the lady, because she couldn’t do it, and would sooner have her tongue cut out, but she’d try and save it up and send it to him gradual. She stuck that letter in an envelope and addressed it to the lady.

See the game? When the lady read it she thought as Mrs. Bird had put two letters in the wrong envelopes accidental.

And the funny thing about it was that Mrs. Bird hadn’t got no brother, nor never had. But she got her five shillings all right. She was to pay it back sixpence a week, and when they Kensal Greened her, the first instalment hadn’t gone in. And that were ten years afterwards.

Of course, her real profession were selling gent’s bootlaces. She’d got just two pair of them, and she never offered them to men for fear they’d be bought and she’d have all the trouble of getting more. That wasn’t her line. She went for the ladies, and she picked out the right kind.

“Buy the last two pair, kind lady,” she’d say, “and then I can get home to baby. He frets so when I ain’t there.”

Ladies, not wanting men’s bootlaces, never bought none, but the thought of that baby used to touch their kindly hearts, and Mrs. Bird didn’t do so badly out of it. She had the same two pair of bootlaces for three years to my knowledge. And I needn’t tell you she never had no baby. She never had nothing as she said she had.

The only difference between that and begging is that with the bootlaces in your hand the police can’t catch you; I never done no begging myself. I’ve sunk pretty low, and I ain’t what you might call on the Buckingham Palace level at the present moment, but I never done no begging. I’ve took presents, same as any other lady might. And I paved the way for them presents, as you might say. Nothing beyond that.

For instance, suppose I goes to a house and does a room out. I always keeps my eye open for anything that might as well be given to the charwoman. Maybe there’s a chair with two doubtful legs stowed away in a corner. Or there’s the vase what Master Percy dropped, put with the chip next the wall, so as not to show. Or there’s a curtain arranged so as to hide the stain.

Well, I alters all that. I puts that crippled chair right out in the room where someone will be bound to set on it, I gives that chipped vase a twist round, and I arranges that curtain so as what you see most of is where little Willie spilt the ink.

I don’t say it always comes off, for it don’t. It didn’t the time the lady come in and set down on that crippled chair accidental, and got a jar to her spine as kept her in bed for three weeks. But every now and then I gets my reward.

“Oh, take and give that rotten old thing to Mrs. Murphy!” the gentleman says. “I can’t stand the sight of it.”

Well, there’s very few things I can’t either sell or find a use for. It’s all so much extra. And, if there ain’t a indelicacy in mentioning of it, the petticoat as I’m wearing this minute were a curtain in the waiting-room of a solicitor’s office for years and years. I could see as he wanted new curtains, but he couldn’t. In fact, I had to tear a great hole in it before he took notice of it. Even then he asked me if I couldn’t stitch it up again.

“No, sir,” I says, “I can’t. The stuff’s that rotten the stitches would just tear through.”

“Oh, take and burn it, then!” he says. “I suppose I’ve got to get new ones.”

And by a funny coincidence the winter were coming on and I were wanting a new petticoat just then.

Yes, you will never find me sneering at anybody for giving away what they don’t want. There’s some as don’t even give that. Speaking general, a gentleman will give away anything he don’t want, but a lady will hang on to it because it may come in someday. Men breaks and gives away. Women mends and saves.

Well, there it is, and you can call it pride if you like to. I ain’t never asked for no charity. Of course, my old age pension, what I’m in sight of at this moment, is a different thing altogether. That’s what I’ve got a right to by law. And even that I’m half afraid of. You see, it will he a change, and changes is trying to people of my time of life. Going on as I’m going on now I should think that, barring accidents, I’ve got another thirty years ahead of me. But when it comes to living a life of ease and luxury on five shillings fresh and fresh every week from the nearest post-office, I can’t say what might happen. I’ve known cases.

There were one in my own family. Leastwise, it were a grandfather of my first husband on the mother’s side. He’d come down in the world and couldn’t get no work. You see, he was old and didn’t look particular strong. I should say that were a family failing; I could have picked up my first husband and chucked him out of the window any day, if I’d wanted to.

Well, this old chap had been tramping London for the best part of a week, looking for work and getting none. Then one evening as he were coming back he saw a shilling lying on the pavement. Some thought it was the stooping what done it, causing a rush of blood to the head what bust his brain. But it seems more like to me it was the excitement of coming into money suddenlike. Anyhow, he rolled over stone dead, and that were the end of him.

Of course, it takes different people different ways. There were a woman I knew in the same line as myself. A decent, hard-working woman she was, and if she’d been left alone she might have been going strong to this day. But she were left money by a uncle in Australia. And what were the consequence? She just sets on the floor now all day with her umbrella up over her head and says she’s a mushroom. She don’t do no actual harm, so she ain’t put away, and a sister of hers looks after her.

That’s a nice sort of life to lead, I don’t think.

Well, I’ve made up my mind to it. If it’s the law of the land that I’ve got to take my pension, then I shall take it. And if I goes dotty or anything else happens to me, you can blame the Government.

•   •   •   •   •   •
•   •   •   •   •   •

ON ACCIDENTS

When a lady breaks a glass, it’s called a pure accident. But when a charwoman breaks a glass, it’s called clumsiness and intemperance. I know what I’m speaking about, for I’ve had some.

“This is valuable china,” says one lady to me, “and I have to wash it myself simply and solely because I can’t trust you with it, Mrs. Murphy. The reckless way you@”

Then the door slammed, and she dropped the tray, and I were sent out to buy a tube of cement. And I sung Alleluia as I put on my bonnet.

I don’t drop no trays when a door slams, because I never were one of the nervy sort. But I don’t mind owning I’ve broke a bit in my time. I has to handle glass and china when it’s wet and slippery, and mostly ladies never touches it till it’s dry and easy to hold. It’s always been a motto with me as more should be broke in the pantry nor is broke in the drawing-room, and I’ve lived up to that. Mind you, I ain’t what you’d call a regular death-and-destruction breaker, but I’ve kept my fair average. And why not? That’s what I always ask. If china were never broke, them as sells it jolly soon would be.

Of course, looked at in one way, life is nothing but a string of accidents. Take marriage, for instance. I should never have married Murphy if he hadn’t happened to be there, and many a time I’ve wished he’d been somewhere else. Still, that is but a manner of speaking. I don’t call such things accidents myself. Marriage ain’t a accident; it’s a judgement.

Funny how accidents happens more to some nor they do to others. There’s my old friend Mrs. Ball. I don’t know why she should be marked out, but she is. If anywheres in London a lift door were left open for ten minutes, by the end of that time you’d find my friend Mrs. Ball at the bottom of the shaft. She’d go straight to it like a lamb to its nest. She’s never missed nothing of that sort.

She were on the Great Wheel at Earl’s Court first time it stopped. Steps was only invented for Mrs. Ball to forget as they was there. She mostly sets down on the place where the chair was afore she moved it. Yes, and she knows how it is with her, too. She always keeps her name and address sewed on the inside of her bonnet, so that the hospital will know where to send the telegram.

I never reads about a collision in my Sunday paper without looking for her name in the list of killed and wounded. It’s a wonder she’s alive still.

But there—every picture has its silver lining. That woman’s had compensation from the London General and two railway companies, and never had to pay a lawyer a penny over it neither. And it’s a softer job to live on compensation nor it is to live by work. Of course, after what she’s been through, she ain’t what you’d call complete. But she ain’t lost nothing that she didn’t have two of to start with, and naturally you’ve got to give them railway companies something for their money. When her end comes—and it can’t be far off, now they’ve started running the motor-buses down her road—she’ll have had a better time than many a poor woman.

Of course, accidents may be of the lucky kind, same as when my first husband went for a day’s fishing, and caught one. But there ain’t so many accidents of that kind. If life is but a lottery, as the hymn says, there’s about one prize to fifty billion blanks.

Still, I’ve had a lucky accident or two in my time. I remember when I was but a young thing in my first place. I went as general, and the lady were of the very strict sort—taught in a Sunday-school, kept everything locked up, and didn’t allow no visitors in the kitchen.

There wasn’t a great lot of things as she did allow, and visitors in the kitchen were what she was hottest against. Now that may be all right when a lady keeps several, for they can talk to one another. But when a lady only keeps one, ain’t that girl never to speak? What did she think I were going to do? Set in that basement all the blessed evening, reading of the parish magazine and humming tunes to the cockroaches? That may have been her idea, but it were not mine. I never had no craving for excitements of that kind.

Well, one night she got the fancy that she heard a man’s voice in the kitchen. She may have been right, and she may have been wrong. Matter of fact, there was a young postman as sometimes looked in for half-an-hour in the evening, to see if we liked the way the letters were being delivered. And why not? A girl may respect herself, even if she don’t relish living in a deaf and dumb asylum.

However, she started off downstairs to see if she could catch me. And if she had caught me, l should have been thrown out without notice and without a character, and that ain’t much of a start for anybody in domestic service. But as it happened, I’d just taken all the stair-rods down to clean them, which was by her own orders, though forgot for the moment. So, the stair-carpet slipping away from under her foot, she did the rest of the journey on her head. And there she was in a senseless heap at the bottom of them stairs, with one leg broke. Why, it were a mercy as I’d got somebody as I could send for the doctor!

Yes, I helped to nurse the poor thing, and it were two or three months before she were about again. I explained to her that, the partition wall being thin, you could hear the people next door talking sometimes almost as if they was in the room with you. I can explain most things, if given time.

I stayed with that lady more nor a year. And then I only left because I thought I were going to get married. Often and often I’ve thought over that accident, and how it all worked out so providential; leastwise, providential for me. Not so much so, perhaps. for the lady, but then at every game somebody’s got to lose.

There is such a thing as accidents done on purpose; but I don’t hold with them, and never did, for it’s like asking for trouble. And that again brings back to my mind the brighter days afore I give way to marriage and went down in the world. I were house-parlourer to a young couple as was newly married. One morning at breakfast as she was opening of her letters, she gave a kind of groan, as if in anguish.

“What’s up?” says her husband.

“Aunt Clara’s coming to dinner tomorrow night.”

“Is she?” he says, in a gloomy sort of way. “Then there’s no help for it. We shall have to get out the china dog.”

It seems that Aunt Clara had made them a present of that china dog. I had never seen it before, and when they fetched it out of the box-room I rather took to it than not. It was a imitation of a fox-terrier, nearly as big as life, and just like it, with a gilt collar round its neck. But it seems that young couple simply could not bear the sight of it. And they was funny in that way too, If they couldn’t bear the sight of a thing, they wouldn’t keep it about as a general rule. Still, as the china dog were Aunt Clara’s present, and they were anxious not to hurt her feelings, I was told to put it on the dining-room mantelpiece. Which I did.

A little later the lady says to me in a mysterious sort of way: “At dinner tonight I shall ask you to get something from the mantelpiece. Do you think that in getting it you can manage to knock that china dog off, so that it breaks in the fender?”

“Certainly I could, marm,” I says. “And I’d break more than that to oblige. But it do seem a pity, such a pretty thing as that is. Couldn’t it be give away to somebody as liked it?”

“No,” says she. “If Mrs. Sturt thought I’d given away her present, her feelings would be hurt. The only way to get rid of it is an accident. And she must know that it was only an accident. I shall have to pretend to be very angry with you about it tonight, but you need not take the least notice of that.”

And with that she give me a last years’ hat and two blouses, and I did as I were told, which were my duty.

She did her part well, too. Though I’d been warned beforehand, she pretty nigh took me in. She said as she would sooner I’d broken anything in the house rather than that, and that she did not understand how I could be so abominably careless, and a lot more abuse of that kind.

After Mrs. Sturt had gone, she and him giggled over it a good deal together, and seemed very pleased with themselves. I’ve often noticed that with ladies. They may be a holy example to the rest of us in every other way, but when it comes to speaking the truth—well, Ananias himself couldn’t teach them nothing.

But they wasn’t quite so pleased two days later, when a box marked “Glass, with care,” come to them by rail. Inside of it were a card marked “With Aunt Clara’s love,” and two china dogs, pugs this time, one with a red collar and one with a blue.

Of course it might have been worse, and I knowed of a case where it were. When I say I knowed of it, I mean I were told of it when I were a little girl, to act as a warning to me. It were about a boy as didn’t want to go on an errand for his mother. So he give himself a cut in the foot with his pocketknife, and pretended it were done accidental. That were on the Monday. Poisoning set in, and on the Tuesday the whole of his leg were black as your hat. On Wednesday, when they got the doctor in to see him, the thing had gone too far. Nothing could have saved him, short of amputation at the waist, and so he had to go. I were told that were a lesson to me to go on errands cheerful, and not make no excuses. It looks to me now when I comes to think over it, more like a lesson to get the doctor in soon enough.

Of course they has to make up tales like them to kid young children into being good. but all the same, I am still set against accidents done on purpose. You are going to get your little lot anyhow, and you don’t want to put in no extra turn. When the forecast says rainy, and the glass is going down, and the bit of seaweed hanging on the dresser has turned moist, and you can see with your own eye the storm coming up, you ain’t called upon to go out into the garden and water the geraniums.

•   •   •   •   •   •
•   •   •   •   •   •

ON POPULARITY

I was popular once. There was a time when friends and relations would ask me to pretty well anything that was going, I remember when my cousin George buried his wife’s mother. Everything nicely done, and port wine handed afterwards. And when I got up to go, George—he was always the gentleman, was George—shook me by the hand and thanked me for making the thing a success. Ah, them days!

But that’s all changed now, and a good black dress is nothing but a constant anxiety, along of the moth. Once past sixty, you ain’t much sought after, neither for work nor for festivity. You’ve got to do the seeking yourself then.

And then relations, I finds, is a touchy lot. They’re for everlasting taking offence. They asks you what you thinks, and then they’re put out because you tell them. Only a few months back I was spending the Sunday afternoon at my sister’s. All went very pleasant until I were leaving.

“Oh, you can’t go,” says she, “until you’ve seen my new hat.”

So that hat were fetched out, and I threw my eye over it and said I’d be getting on.

“But you ain’t told me what you think of it,” says my sister

“Well,” says I, “it’s a very nice hat for one day in the year.”

“Meaning Sundays,” says she. “Well. that were my idea too.”

“No,” says I, “not meaning Sundays. Meaning Guy Fawkes.”

And, if you’ll believe me, for six weeks after that she’d never as much as speak to me. There’s a nice Christian spirit in a sister, I don’t think.

Ah, I notices it every day and there’s no getting away from it. As you grows older, other people grows more cantankerous, and the few words as you’ve only spoke for their good gets brought up against you. I likes popularity well enough, same as most do, but you can give too much for it. If I’m to begin picking and choosing my words, when I’m talking to my own sister—well, where’s it going to stop? No, I puts independence first and comfort second, for popularity ain’t no stayer.

And you don’t want to look so very far back to see the truth of that neither. There was a time when I never did out a sitting-room without finding a ping-pong hall under some bit of furniture. Up at the Rectory when I were working there, the housemaid knocked two teeth out with one of them diabolos, which the cook said were a judgement on her for playing games of a Sunday. And where’s your ping-pong and your diabolos nowadays? Dead. Never heard of. As for the skating-rink, it’s popped in and out like a rabbit. One year it’s eighty per cent. and next year the Salvation Army’s got it a bargain.

One year everyhody’s doing it and next year everybody’s leaving it alone. And that’s popularity. Give me something with a bit more wear in it.

But while it lasts, there’s money in it—make no mistake about that. Look at that Mrs. Moggat. She can’t do the day’s work that I can, and she wouldn’t if she could. She ain’t what would be commonly called honest. She’ll drink enough beer to wash a tram-car. But all the same she were getting her five and a half days regular every week, while I had to sit idle half my time. And for why? I’ll tell you. She had something happen to her face. It may have been a illness or it may have been a accident, and at the hospital where they took her, the doctors never expressed no opinion for certain. But when she come out her mouth were all drawed up one side so that she looked like one of them comic actors. You couldn’t look at her without laughing. Nobody could. And it were that face as got her the work. People as wanted cheering up a bit would have Mrs. Moggat in for the day.

Of course, that were the kind of thing that couldn’t go on for long. It’s the same with a face as it is with any other kind of amusement—the novelty of it wears off. Besides, by the time the ladies had done laughing over Mrs. Moggat’s face, they’d got to start worrying over what she broke. And then, of course, merit come in, and I got back the work what she’d done me out of. We never had no actual words about it, though she did come to me saying she couldn’t think why ladies didn’t employ her no more.

“Ah!” I says. “Likely they’ve had Sunday tickets for the Zoo given them, and so don’t need it.”

Yes, it’s much better to pass a thing off with a joke like that, than it is to descend to actual rudeness. More ladylike, too.

I knowed two sisters once—both in service. One of them were highly popular. She were one of them pretty, high-spirited girls. There were such a lot going on at the back-door of the house where she was that she hardly ever got time to do her work. On her afternoons off she could have had a dozen to take her out, simply by holding up her finger. The men were fair crazy about her. But—and this is what I want you to notice—all that popularity never led to nothing. She’s never got married. And I puts it all down to her popularity. Them men must have had some relicts of sense after all. The wise fly don’t marry the honey-pot.

Now her sister were different altogether. She were not pretty, nor yet ugly enough to make a song about. So quiet you hardly knew she was there. Not half the favourite her sister was, so folks would have told you. But when it come to serious business—why. before she were twenty-three she were married to one of the grocer’s young men as afterwards rose in life. Yes, it ain’t your popular girl as always gets married; more often it’s the girl as really puts her heart into the work.

And what’s popularity in men, when you come to look at it? Why, my late husband were popular with almost everybody as didn’t know him properly. Seems to me sometimes as almost any man can be popular so long as he spends too much, drinks too much, and talks too much. But that ain’t the class of man as is asked to take on the management with an increased salary. More has been ruined by popularity nor has ever been helped by it.

I were saying the same to my dear old friend, Mrs. Ball, only the other night, and she turned on me.

“Why,” she says, “it’s just the old story of the fox as lost his tail through climbing after the sour grapes. You ain’t popular yourself, nor likely to be with that tongue of yours. So you don’t want nobody else to be popular neither.”

“Begging your pardon. Mrs. Ball.” I says, “but as usual you’ve got the wrong nail by the handle; I may say as one-and-six ain’t untold wealth, and yet be ready to give you seventeen pence halfpenny for it as often as you cares for the swop. I know what popularity’s worth, and I’m always willing to buy it for a shade less.”

“Ah!” says she, “you were always one for a bargain.”

“Yes,” says l, “and if I could buy you at my price and sell you at your own, I’ve no doubt I should get one. Which I don’t expect, fancy prices not being give for sheep’s head as a rule.”

“What do you mean?” says she.

“just what you please,” I says. “If the cap fits you can put it in your pipe and smoke it.”

And, of course, I might have said a good deal more, but I didn’t want no unpleasantness.

For one thing it were a Sunday, and then a friend’s a friend, however mistaken. Besides, it were her tea as we were drinking at the time, and that ties your hand in a manner of speaking.

The other day I seed a small puppy go waddling down the street. I can’t say what breed it was, but it looked like a piece of a doormat. That puppy fairly held up the traffic. Everybody had to stop and gape and grin over it. Every woman and child it met tried to pet it. Even the policeman smiled, and that’s not a thing you see every day.

And many a time I’ve walked down the same street. I’m a hard-working woman, and Church of England if asked. I may have made my mistakes—most women who has married twice has made two at any rate. But I’ve got experience and sense now. So far as looks are concerned, there ain’t a lot to choose between me and that puppy, but do l find everybody stopping to admire me? They takes no more notice than if I were a hole in the ground, and not so much. And that’s popularity, that is.

As long as you’re young enough you can get it. Puppies is more popular than dogs, and kittens than cats, and a nice-looking baby with no more sense than a maggot will always fetch people round it. The one thing that they have got is youth, and that’s one of the many good things you cannot keep.

Young men and women don’t often come to you for advice, being too busy giving it to other people. Between fifteen and twenty-five they’re ready to teach the whole world what it ought to do next. Between sixty and seventy you sometimes wonders if you knows enough to settle what you will have for breakfast.

Still, if any of them young people did come to me and ask for my opinion, I should put it like this:

“If you find yourself getting liked, and it all comes in a natural way of business, that’s all right, just think it over and see what you can do. There may be pickings the same as in the case of Mrs. Moggat. But don’t you never lay yourself out to be popular, for you’re likely to be bidding too high for a inferior article. Sure as ever you find yourself the friend of everybody, you’ve only got to look in the glass to see your enemy.”

And for that matter, if you’re hungering and thirsting to get yourself disliked, there ain’t no surer way than by giving folk advice. If it turns out wrong they are angry with you for misdirecting of them, and if it turns out right they are worse angry with you for telling them so beforehand, and giving yourself them superior sort of airs.

•   •   •   •   •   •
•   •   •   •   •   •

ON EXPERIENCE

Seems to me I were born at a awkward time. Either it was twenty years too early or twenty years too late, and I’ll tell you what makes me say so.

When I were a girl and going into my first place, it was brought up against me that I’d got no experience, and wages was according. Nowadays, with enough experience to fill six of them pantechnicons, I get turned down because I’m not young enough. When I were a girl, they wanted you to know how to do a thing. Nowadays they don’t care whether you know how to do it, so long as you do it quick enough and hard enough.

Maybe there is something to be said for both sides, and in that case a working-woman is only wanted for about five years of her life—the prime cut out of the middle. And if that is so, what I asks is, what has she got to do with the rest of her time?

It’s as easy to give too much for experience as it is to give too much for a pennyworth of shrimps. And there are some I things where experience is of no manner of use when you’ve got it. It won’t teach you to fall off the top of a five-story house without hurting yourself when you hit the pavement.

When a young man’s looking out for a wife, he ain’t over and above anxious to find one what has been married five times afore. But in my line of business the more experience you has, the better. It ain’t only as it teaches you how to do the work, it teaches you how to look after yourself. And if you don’t look after yourself, nobody’s going to do it for you. A charwoman may work like a angel from heaven, but that’s going to be no use to her if she puts herself wrong with the cook or even with the lady of the house. The other day I’d just finished doing the steps, and they looked more like a picture than anything human. Up comes the little dog with mud all over him and scampers up them steps.

A inexperienced woman would have lost her temper, give way to language and throwed something at the dog. But out of the tail of my eye I see the lady of the house just behind that dog, and I shaped according—spoke to him as if I loved him in spite of all. That did me no harm with the lady, and I put myself right with the dog afterwards. Later when the lady asked what he’d been yelping for, I said he’d fell off a chair in the kitchen. That were as near the truth as no matter. Either he’d fell off or he’d been knocked off. I never could study them fine shades.

Years ago now I went to see a lion-tamer. The very next night the poor blighter got downed by one of them lions. The things as I’ve missed by about twenty-four hours would fill a book and is simply heartbreaking.

However, what I was going to say was that all them wild animals had to be treated different. Some of them could be bullied, some of them had to be humoured, some of them had to be let alone. It’s just exactly the same thing when a charwoman goes into a new house. If she’s wise, she goes slow and takes a look round first. She’s got to deal with the cook and to deal with the lady, and she’s got to find out what their natures is.

I’ve knowed cooks that were, as you might say, untameable. I’ve knowed ladies that could be brought to feed out of the hand, so to speak, within three hours’ time of my coming into the house. Some of them need the rough side of your tongue, and some of them need the oily side, and you’ve got to settle which it’s to be. That’s where experience helps a charwoman.

There’s a sort of wild look in the eye as some cooks has, and when I sees that I takes no liberties. Even telling them as you know for a fact that one of the tradesmen’s carts is madly in love with them, has no more effect than if you’d never spoke. With that sort you’ve just got to do your work, say as little as possible, and put up with the unpleasantness of it.

When your employer accuses you of not being as young as you ought to be, it is a great comfort to think as you know more than you did. There were a time when I did not know my way about London. I remember taking a bus to see my poor old grandfather at Hammersmith, and fetching up at Ludgate Circus through having got the direction mixed in my head. Well, there ain’t very much you can tell me about the London bus service nowadays.

For instance, when I was working at the rectory one day a week regular, they allowed me my bus fare one way. They said it would encourage me to get to my work early. Perhaps it would and perhaps it wouldn’t. If you want to encourage anyone to get to her work early you will find it ain’t a bad plan to tell her she will get the sack if she don’t. But be that as it may, the busfare from my door to the rectory door were twopence. That’s what I always charged, and there were no dishonesty about it. They could always get on the same bus and try it themselves, and prove as I were correct. But I always stepped off that bus about fifty yards from the rectory door, and then the fare were only a penny. So I were a penny to the good every week. It mayn’t seem much to you, but pennies soon mounts up. As the proverb says, a hundred pence is eight-and-sevenpence.

Then, again, as a girl of eighteen, I see a sort of diamond brooch in a window as I took a fancy to. I’ve outlived that kind of thing now, but girls is partial to finery. So I went into the shop and bought the brooch, handed the man my shilling, and waited for the change. He took that shilling and bent it double between his finger and thumb.

Well, that were my loss. I didn’t like it, but I’d got to put up with it. I hadn’t got the experience then as I’ve picked up since. The other day I looked in at a public for a glass of stout, which is only what the doctor himself recommended, and again I put down a shilling. The bloke took it and ran it through his machine, and handed me the hit as had come off it.

“That’s all right,” I says. “But how am I to know as that were my shilling? You may have changed it for all I could see.”

Well, he argued, and I argued, and made so much of it that up came the boss. He was a good-natured sort of man to look at.

“Well, mother,” he says, “what’s the matter with you now?”

So I tell him all the story, and at last he bunged me a sixpence, and says: “All right, mother, we’ll split the loss between us.”

He’d forgot that I hadn’t paid for the stout, and it wasn’t for me to stick myself forward by reminding him of it.

Then when I come out I sets my head to work to think where I’d got that bad shilling. Either it were in the money what were paid to me at the rectory, or it were in the change what I got from the coster’s barrow, where I was buying myself a rabbit. So I give the rectory the benefit of the doubt, and got my money back from them. I didn’t know the address of that barrow, And that shows you how even your losses may work out into a profit, if you’ve got experience.

It ain’t no good for the young to pretend to be experienced, but the experienced may sometimes make a bit by pretending to be young. Murphy used always to say that the skilled workman who had the best chance was a healthy man of fifty to fifty-five who stood pretty straight and had dyed his hair coal black. He’d get the job along of his black hair, and he’d be able to do the work along of his experience. He were a good talker at times, were Murphy, and there may have been truth in what he said. but there were some things as he forgot to mention.

For instance, he could do his own work himself—few better—and so everyone said. But he never would do it along of his laziness.

Of course, it is the theatre that gives the best chance for the experienced to look young. Them actresses can do themselves up and you can’t get near enough to see the difference. That’s where they have the chance. It wouldn’t do me no good to get myself up as the fairy in the pantomime, because in my work you gets looked at pretty close, and by daylight.

Seems a pity it can’t be arranged for youth and experience to go together—both sentences to run concurrently, as the magistrate says to you. But that is not to be, and it’s easy enough to see which of the two is the better.

Experience is the better. It’s better by long streets. It makes fewer mistakes, it loses less money, it don’t get married to so many wrong people.

Yes, that’s the funny part about it—experience is the better, but it ain’t the one that you want most.

That’s the point as doctors and parsons never seems to allow for.

“This here’s good for you,” they says. “and that there’s bad for you,” and they thinks that settles it.

Settles it? As a rule it don’t even touch it.

Most of the time folks ain’t choosing between what’s good and bad. They’re choosing between what they wants and what they don’t want. Look at this question of drink. All doctors knows about it, for it’s one of the things they has to learn up. But I’ve seed cases in my Sunday paper more nor once of doctors that has come down in the world through drink.

You’ll seldom hear any young person wishing to be more experienced. When you’re eighteen you know everything. I’ve got a niece who’s forty-seven and she’s got a daughter who’s eighteen. My niece comes to me for advice about most things. She can hardly bring herself to spend sixpence without asking my opinion of the goods. But her daughter mostly begins:

“Now I’ll tell you what you ought to do.” She’d advise the Prime Minister and the Bank of England if they’d give her a chance.

But you’ll hear plenty of elderly, experienced people wishing they were young again. I don’t waste much time over grumbling at what can’t be helped myself. Still, if you do happen to invent a machine for taking twenty or thirty years off a lady’s age, you has my leave to send me particulars on a postcard.

•   •   •   •   •   •
•   •   •   •   •   •

ON HEALTH

I don’t say as health ain’t a necessity, for it is. Matter of fact, more nor one has died from the want of it. But I do say as, like most other things, it may be carried too far. What I mean is as you may have too much talk and fuss about it.

Now here’s what you might call a instance. I reads in my paper of a Sunday as how some bloke has lived to a hundred. What does it show? Shows he’s a sticker, and don’t show nothing else. The paper generally owns up that he’s in full possession of his faculties, but apart from that he may be seemingly just as well as you or me. Then you gets the fuss. The paper sends a boy round to ask how it’s done. And what does the old bloke say? What he says is mostly “Give it up.” Give up what? Give up everything.

“No alcoholic intoxicating stimulants,” says Methuselah, “and never smoke. Never eat meat, and very rarely eat anything else. Don’t work hard, and avoid anything like pleasure. Take moderate exercise so long as you don’t enjoy it. Anything which causes strain, such as love, death, or want of money, should have the pen put through it. To bed early and rest during the day. Take one glass of hot water when you don’t feel inclined. Them is the simple rules that has made me what I am.”

I mayn’t have got the exact words, but they’re not so far out. And the silly old blighter thinks he’s lived for a hundred years. Lived? He’s been dead all the time.

I ain’t going to lay down no rules on health. Only the doctors can lay down the rules, and even they can’t keep them. I used to clean a surgery once, and it were an eye-opener. But what I sticks to is that if you’re forever asking yourself if you’re ill, you jolly soon will be. Them as takes the most trouble over their health gets the least return for it. Leave it alone. If ever you’re really ill, you’ll know it fast enough without no asking.

I am sure the precautions that some take is past words, and may lead to a misunderstanding, which is what happened to my own cousin as let lodgings at Clacton.

A lady had been to look over her rooms, and was going to engage them. “But,” she says, “I should like these curtains and hangings removed, because it’s the scientific opinion that they harbour germs.”

“Not in this house,” says my cousin, very decided. “We are most scrupulous. I does all the bedrooms myself, and I’ve never even seen one.”

And it was only afterwards that it flashed across her mind that they might not have been talking about the same thing.

Fact is, there’s a deal too much medical talk going about nowadays. And it’s spread to such a extent that I’m blessed if they don’t sometimes try to get the drawing-room illnesses down into the kitchen. I’ve no patience with it. I don’t like to see young girls aping the class above them. Only the other day an under-housemaid, just turned nineteen, had the cheek to tell me as she were a sufferer from brain-fag and insomnia, which is a pet name for when you can’t sleep.

“Oh, no, my girl, you ain’t,” says I. “I can tell you what your complaint is.”

“Well,” she says, “what would you call it?”

“Swank,” says I. “Swank and nothing else. Under-housemaids don’t have them things you’ve been talking about. If you’d said you’d got a cough or a pain below the waist-line, I might have listened to you. But them fancy diseases don’t belong to your walk in life at all. Insomnia, indeed! Why, you’ll be telling me you’ve got a motorcar next.”

There’s illnesses as is illnesses, and there’s illnesses as ain’t. And it’s only them with time and money to spare as can afford the illnesses as ain’t. When the under-housemaid can’t get her sleep, either she ain’t done enough work to earn it, or there’s trouble with somebody at the tradesman’s entrance.

And I ain’t got much liking for them as does their own doctoring neither. Act fair, I says. If you’re ill, have the thing done regular, with a proper doctor, and a proper death certificate afterwards, and don’t give your family the worry and scandal of a inquest. Doctors has got a living to make, same as anybody else, and any disease you may happen to have they’ve got a claim on. Every man to his trade is a good motto. How should I like it if the Archbishop of Canterbury come along and sneaked one of my regular jobs? And it’s much the same thing if you does the doctor out of his little bit.

Yet I have known ladies as were that fond of doctoring on their own account that they couldn’t he flogged off it. There were a case in my younger days when I was in service, before I got married and come down in the world. Servants didn’t stay with her long. Being strong,I could stick it better than most of them, but even I give way in the end. That lady had got enough stuff to stock a chemist’s shop, and she were for everlasting handing it out to you. Of course, anything that could be put down the kitchen sink were put. But what were you to do when she stood over you to see you take it? The only one who got any good out of it were the cook, she having said a little drop of port was the best thing to take away the taste afterwards. And even that were no permanent good, being, as you might say, the beginning of the end, and bringing on habits as broke off her engagement and lost her three good situations subsequent.

Of course, things might have been worse, and very nearly were. It was when she give the boot-boy carbolic in mistake for something else that I thought it was about time for me to go. As it was, I had to take a week’s holiday with my married sister in the country before I felt myself again.

Ah, they don’t make medicines now like they used to then. It’s what they calls a lost art. In my young days medicine had a strong smell, and a full flavour, and a colour like old mahogany. Nowadays you get them little round white tablets in a bottle with a bit of cotton wool on the top to keep the draught out. You lay one of them on the tip of your tongue, take a gulp of water, and it’s all over.

And dangerous work it is too. One house where I worked the old lady died and her niece found one of them glass bottles with the label on and the round white things in it. According to the label they were to be took for rheumatism, which was what she suffered from. So she finished that lot and they did her good, and she went to buy more of the same. But she complained to the chemist that the new lot hadn’t got the little holes in the middle like the old, and so the truth come out. The old lady had used that bottle to keep them small shirt buttons in, and the niece had swallowed nineteen of them.

I won’t say that the life of a charwoman is a little heaven here below, for it ain’t. It may wipe out some of them as are not strong enough for it, but on the whole I should call it healthy. You get your fresh air going and coming, and you get your exercise while you are at work. The question of diet don’t trouble you. Some eats what the doctor says and some eats what the doctor forbids. The charwoman eats what there is. It’s worked very well in my case.

Yes, I enjoys my health. The funny thing is that there’s some as enjoys their illnesses. There were that Mrs. Saul, for instance. She weren’t exactly a relation of mine, but she were a relation of a relation, if you know what I mean. She were a heavy woman and broke the small bone of her leg through getting off an omnibus with too much of a jump. They took her to the London Hospital, and for weeks afterwards she gave herself such airs, there were no bearing of her.

“To hear you talk, Mrs. Saul,” I said, “anybody would think you’d been first prize in the beauty competition, if they didn’t look at you. All you have done has been to break your leg, and any other fool could have done as much. So don’t go talking as if you were the heroine out of a book.”

But hints of that kind were simply thrown away on her. She was a martyr to indigestion, and you couldn’t meet her in the street without being told what started it, what the feelings were like, and what were the only things that really did it any good. I sometimes think that I know more about that woman’s inside than I do about my own. If I don’t, it hasn’t been for want of telling. She ain’t what you’d call an active woman, and if she has to lay up in bed for a week it’s a regular little treat for her. But that ain’t what she enjoys most. What she enjoys most is the fuss, and the chance of bragging about it afterwards to somebody that don’t want to listen to it. The only thing as will stop her enjoying her own funeral will be that she can’t talk about it afterwards.

Of course, she always tells me that I’m a hard, unfeeling woman, and if I’d seen more illness I should have more sympathy. Maybe it’s true. I never had the time and money to do much in the way of illness myself, and my children was all healthy. My first husband never had much the matter with him till he was took, though he often thought he had. He was a man that was generally mistaken. Murphy was different. Headaches the morning after was what he suffered from, and then it run to temper and language. I’m sure taking a cup of tea to him in the morning was like walking straight into a lion’s nest, and if you didn’t take it, it was even worse.

The rum thing was that when he did get really ill he was altogether different. A child could have handled him. About the only three weeks when he never give me no trouble was the last three weeks of his life. But there’s lots of men like that. They works themselves up into a fury over all the little things, but they takes the big things as quiet as a lamb.

The day before he died there was nothing left in the house, and I went round to my sister’s and asked her for eight shillings.

“I want to get my black dress out,” I says.

“What,” she says, “is he gone?”

“No,” I says, “but he’s going.”

“Did the doctor tell you?”

“No,” I said, “it were not the doctor. It were something the poor sufferer himself said to me this morning.”

So she lent me the money with no more words, and I got the dress out. What Murphy had said that morning was “Thank you,” and it weren’t like him.

•   •   •   •   •   •
•   •   •   •   •   •

ON SAVING

Very near lost my patience the other day. The lady at a house where I goes was handing me the usual half-crown for four shillings’ worth of work, and had the cheek to ask me if I never put by nothing for a rainy day.

“No, ma’am,” I said. “I don’t, because I’m out in the wet already. And no umbrella.”

Nice thing to ask a poor old woman whose life has been one everlasting blizzard, to put by something for a rainy day. How am I to do it? l pays my rent. I’ve got into the habit of eating at times. I can’t see without light, wash without soap, cook without fire, dress without clothes, or get anything without paying for it. Seeing that it’s a lucky week when I makes my ten bob, and that I has them little things to attend to, you’ll understand why I ain’t putting money by in the post-office. And then to hear that lady talking to me as if I ought to chuck racing, and the yacht, and the second motor. Saving ain’t altogether what it’s cracked up to be. I’ve knowed some as put by every farthing they could, and they were not pleasant to live with. My first husband were a saving man, and he saved out of me mostly. If there were anything I wanted I couldn’t have it. And my second husband spent that money, and spent it mostly on himself. Never done me no good either way. It’s enough to give anybody a prejudice, you know.

I knowed one family where a deal of fuss was made about money-boxes. They was teaching the children thrift, they was. And what was the consequence? The youngest kid of all saw that when her brothers and sisters dropped money into their money-boxes, they was always praised for it. She hadn’t got no money nor no money-box herself, being too young for it. But she did what she could. She took fourteen-and-six what the cook had left on the kitchen dresser, and dropped it down the grating at the side of the pavement into the main drain. It amused me, that did, but some of the others didn’t seem to see the joke.

I remember the only time my second husband ever saved anything. He heard of a good berth and one as would have suited him, for with all his faults he was clever at his trade. He starts out one morning to see the boss. He had to walk nearer three miles than two, and he wouldn’t spend a penny on a bus.

When he got to the place the boss told him he were just two minutes too late. That berth had been give to another man. Oh, yes, he’d saved his penny bus fare all right, but he spent eightpence on beer before he come back. And I always thought that that disappointment was one of the things as give him a distaste for regular work in after life.

I knowed a housemaid once as had just been paid her month. It were her evening out, and she took her purse with her. She saw a hat in a shop window as took her fancy no end. She felt she would look something in that hat. She knew the price was more than she ought to give, but that couldn’t be helped. Just as she were going into the shop she changed her mind. She wasn’t going to be misled by vanity, she wasn’t. She would go straight away to the post-office and pay the money in and get out of the way of temptation. She were just a few yards away from the post-office when a man snatched her purse and did a bunk with it. So she lost the lot. At the end of the next month she went straight for the hat-shop again, but the hat as she wanted were gone. Bound to be.

They don’t put stories like them in the good books for the young, but all the same they happens.

Then, again, saving is a habit what grows on you just the same as drink. Only last Sunday I read in my paper about some old woman as died of starvation. And they found two hundred golden sovereigns in her house and she’d got more in the bank. Where is the sense of it? We ain’t in this world for evermore, and our last train out don’t carry no luggage. If that old woman had took them sovereigns and pitched them in the Thames she’d ’a’ been acting just as sensible, for all the good they ever did her. There’s many a one saves money when he might enjoy it, and has it to spend when he can’t enjoy it.

Of course, there’s two sides to every picture, and many a one has felt the benefit of money put by. Nobody’s denying it. All I says is that saving ain’t always the great catch it’s held out to be. The thinner you spread your butter the more bread it will cover. But when you don’t know how much bread you’ve got you may spread it just a bit too thin. The same thing with money. The less you spends the longer it will last, but you don’t know how long you are going to last yourself. And mind, saving money ain’t the same as making it. No man ever got rich yet through saving money. Anybody can save.

And then you may ask me why it is that they don’t do it. Well, the trouble is that you don’t know what it is to be short of cash until you are short. Them as might save don’t feel the need for it. Them as feels the need for it ain’t got nothing to save.

Matter of fact, I’m rather of a saving nature myself, though I’ve got nothing in actual cash to show for it. I can’t even bear to leave a tap on the drip, though it is the company’s water and it ain’t my tap. You’ll never find me leaving a light on accidentally as should be turned off. And there ain’t very much in the world as I can’t make a use of. Why, in one day I made sixpence out of things as ladies had given me to throw away. I never passes a pin without stooping to pick it up, though I’ve torn my hand several times through forgetting whereabouts in my dress I’d stuck it. Ladies notices that in me, and it’s all in my favour.

That niece of mine, what I spoke of as were in service as a house-parlourmaid, used to tell me as her motto was to be pretty careful with anything of her own, and to use a free hand with anything of her employer’s.

“Yes, ducky,” I says, “but you can’t do it. You can’t run two contrariwise habits together. Either you are chucking it about, or you are going careful. If you starts by wasting your employer’s stuff you’ll go on by wasting your own.”

And them words come true, too. Many a time that girl’s come to me for sixpence or a shilling, to be paid back when she got her wages at the end of the month. Never give her none yet. Don’t encourage that kind of thing. Spending money before you gets it is like eating your dinner at breakfast time.

She were a queer girl, that niece of mine. I remember once it were her afternoon off and she’d asked me to call for her so as we could go up to Highgate and see a few funerals. It was pleasant weather for it. And so I called at the house where she worked. She’d got her hat on already, but just as we were starting she sings out: “Half a minute, auntie,” and goes back in the kitchen again. I heard a bit of a crash and she come out smiling.

“I’ll tell you what that was,” she said. “I was a little unfortunate with the china at first, and so they took to charging me a shilling a month break money. Just as I was starting out with you it came over me in a flash as I hadn’t broke anything this month. So I’ve just done in a vegetable-dish and two teacups. You may as well have what you pays for.”

“Yes,” I says, “you’ll always do that. But you won’t always pay for what you have.”

I was talking to my old friend, Mrs. Ball, the other day about this very subject. She were saying—and I can’t but agree with her—that women was more economical than men. Look in at the railway station at any suburb. The men goes up to town first class, and later in the day their wives go up third. Women take the bus, and their husbands take taxis.

Taken generally, women don’t drink. smoke, nor gamble. And there ain’t a lot of men as don’t do all of them. And when a woman finds that she’s got to save, she can use a deal of tact about it.

I remember one house where I worked. The lady had reverses. They’d got to pull in a bit. The lady made a list of things, and I happened to come across it accidental afterwards. First, her husband was to give up his clubs. Second, he was to give up cigars and smoke pipes. Third, he was to go teetotal. Fourth, there was to be cheaper food in the kitchen. Fifth, her husband was to sell his motor-bicycle. And so it went on. There was a list of about twenty things in all, and there wasn’t one of them that touched her anywhere.

I’ve noticed frequent as everybody’s got something to be mean about. Now I’m going to a house tomorrow where there’s enough waste in the kitchen to keep six families. There’s plenty of money, and it’s chucked about.

All the same, in that house, string is sacred. You’ve got to undo the knots. If you chucks an odd end of string on the fire, and the lady catches you at it, you’re likely to lose your job.

Some men are just the same about matches. Now I don’t buy no matches myself, because so many boxes comes my way accidental that there ain’t no necessity. But I ain’t mean about matches; I uses them as required. Yet I’ve seen men as were well-off burn their silly fingers through trying to make one match do the work of two.

One lady I knows saves them strips of gummed paper what comes off the edge of stamps. She’s got a drawer stuffed full of it. And if you asked her what she was going to do with it, she couldn’t tell you.

It may sometimes be foolish to save what’s worth saving. But what are you to say about cases where folks hoards rubbish? Mostly I says nothing, charwomen not being paid to pass remarks. But it strikes me that, if everybody got their deserts, most of the asylums would have to build an extension.

•   •   •   •   •   •
•   •   •   •   •   •

ON FATE

What has got to be has got to be. So my old mother always said, and I’ve noticed the same myself. And when you’ve noticed it, it don’t do you a powerful lot of good, because you don’t know what’s got to be and what ain’t. That’s where the catch comes in. Say that the express what you’re travelling by jumps the points at the junction, you may say it had got to be. But that don’t help you much when part of your face is sticking out of the back of your head, or the ton of wreckage on top of your broken legs has just caught fire.

All the same, I ain’t lived in this world as long as I have without learning a thing or two about fate. As we all know, there’s good luck and bad. Some trusts to good luck, and some thinks that they’re marked out for the other kind. And they’re both wrong. Don’t you never do neither of them two things, for they leads to misery.

Good luck never comes when you whistles it. Remember that. The man who bets on horses so as he can put back what he borrowed out of his employer’s till ain’t never going to find a winner. Soon as your luck sees you’re depending on it and ain’t exerting of yourself, it breaks off short. It’s going to be the master and not the servant, luck is. Give it your orders, and it turns its back on you. Ain’t I seen that for myself? When I married Murphy all in a hurry like, without troubling to find out a bit about him first, my luck went right out and stopped out. It’s like making a dash for the railway station on the chance that the train may be three minutes late in starting—that’s the day when that train will be dead on time.

Yes, and don’t believe in your bad luck neither. If you do, you’ll get it. You’ll lose all your spirit and judgement, and make a mess of things for yourself, and you’ll call it bad luck anyhow. I’ve seen many a man as put his good luck down to his own cleverness, and his foolishness down to his bad luck. That aggravating niece of mine is one of that kidney.

“Had a bit of bad luck yesterday afternoon,” she says to me. “Went out and left the kettle on the fire accidental.”

“Pity,” I says. “Well, I’ve had a bit of good luck. Did a day’s cleaning at a house, and got half-a-crown.”

“But that ain’t luck, auntie,” she says. “That’s work.”

“Yes,” I says. “I know. And yours weren’t luck neither. It were fat-headedness.”

But she never did like being told things, that niece of mine. There’s a good few as don’t—not as it ever stops me.

I’ll give you another warning. You look out as your luck ain’t setting a trap for you, which is what happened to my poor brother-in-law down in the country. Years and years ago it was. He were not a racing man, never thought about it, and never knew nothing about it. But one night, he dreamt he rode the Derby winner. That dream so stuck in his mind that he turned up a list of the horses, and he found there was one called Cottager. Well, he lived in a cottage himself, and that looked like a tip from heaven. He showed that list to my sister, who knew as little about it as he did, and asked her which name she fancied.

“Why, Cottager,” she said.

That made him the more certain. They was living near Epsom, and he took a day off for the race—first time he’d ever been to one. He borrowed a card from a gentleman, and saw that Cottager was numbered one on the card. That settled it. He lumped on fourteen shillings with a bookie on the hill, and tried to work out how he’d spend his winnings. And the blooming horse were not even placed. Happens so sometimes.

Of course, every now and then you comes on a man as simply can’t do wrong. There was that Mr. Samuelson, what I worked for once. If that man had fell out of the window he’d never have hurt himself. A cartload of feather beds would have been spilt all over the pavement just a moment before. Of course, the strangest thing that happened to him was about his umbrella.

He gave six shillings for it when it were new, and he’d had it three years. His missis were always at him to get another one. So he didn’t. One day, as he were going back from the place where he lunched to his office, he suddenly noticed that he wasn’t carrying his umbrella. Off he goes back to the restaurant.

“Did I leave my umbrella here?” he says. “Dark curved handle with a nick in it.”

“Yes, sir,” says the waiter, and hands it out to him.

He thought no more about it until he were going to put it in the hat rack when he took his train back in the evening. Then he saw that it were not his umbrella at all. It were a silk umbrella with a heavy silver band round it. Well, that didn’t worry him much. He started to read his evening paper and fell asleep over it. He woke up with only just time to get out at his station. He snatched his umbrella and hopped out as the train were moving.

You’ll hardly credit it, but he’d changed that umbrella again. The one he’d got now were a brand new silk one with gold mountings. Must have cost two or three quid.

And when he got home the first thing his missis said to him was, “I don’t know what you’d have done if it had come on to rain today. You forgot your umbrella this morning.”

He never found out who the owner of that good umbrella was. Don’t know that he exerted himself particularly about it, any more than I should have done in his place.

I tell you another thing. You be very careful as you don’t say nothing to provoke your luck to turn against you. That’s a error as many have made. I knowed a case of two brothers—rather a larky lot, they was—what had just took a house in the country and bought their season tickets to come into town every day. The very first morning they gets into a carriage where a old parson was sitting. I suppose he wanted the whole carriage to himself, and he glared at them, showing as he was put out. So they started to pull his leg a bit.

One of ’em says, “I say, George, what are we to do if they want to see our tickets?”

“Oh,” says George, “we’ll keep a lookout. We shall have time to get under the seats.”

“Get yourself in such a mess that way,” said the other. “Seems to me it would be better to say we were seasons, and forgotten to bring our tickets with us.”

“Right you are,” says George.

Presently the inspector come along, and, them being new, he didn’t know their faces.

“Season,” says George.

“Season,” says the other.

“All tickets to be shown this morning, sir,” says the inspector.

And then they found that they really had forgotten them. The parson took out his gold watch, had a look at it, and changed into another carriage. And nice fools them two larky young men felt themselves.

Of course, the thing as most provokes your luck to turn against you is bragging. If you happens to say that you’ve never had the measles, and you suppose you’re too old for it now, you may just as well send round for the doctor to call in next morning. You’ll want him.

If you points to the tea-service you’ve had ever since you was married, and never a bit of it broke, you’d better begin saving up for a new tea-service. You ain’t going to be let off.

I were talking to my sister the other day, and giving her a few hints on this very subject.

“There’s one thing,” says she, “as puzzles me. Here are you knowing all about good luck and bad, and giving me directions what I am to do and what I ain’t to do. But I ain’t heard as you’ve took a house in Grosvenor Square yet. If you know such a lot about it, why ain’t you done better for yourself?”

“Well,” I says, “it’s hard to make you understand anything. You’ve not been gifted with the brains for it. Still, I’ll put it to you as simple as I can. Suppose I’m coming down a flight of stairs and you’re coming after me, and the wood of one of the stairs is rotten and pitches me over. Ain’t I justified in hollering out to you to look after yourself?”

And all the answer she could make to that was that I would jaw a dog’s hind leg off, which were no answer at all, as I told her.

The trouble about learning from your own mistakes is that there ain’t a great lot of time left after you’ve finished learning. I’ve heard it said that every man should build two houses—the first to learn how to build a house, and the second to live in. It looks to me as if we ought to have two lives—the first to learn how to live, and the second to enjoy ourselves.

All I can say is as I acts on my own advice. You’ll never hear me worrying about my bad luck. I ain’t one of them as believes that it must come on to rain because they’re out for the afternoon, and I don’t trust to good luck neither. I might have money left me. It’s happened before to charwomen what has worked for old invalid ladies and has made themselves agreeable. If it did come my way I should be very glad of it, but I don’t count on it. If I was to hear of a chance of regular work tomorrow, and my old friend, Mrs. Ball a-walking to the place to get it, I should hop on to a tram so as to have first look in. If you takes care of yourself, that don’t do no harm when the luck starts to take care of you as well. And if you don’t look out for yourself, bad luck comes all the heavier.

There were a little girl at a house where I worked as were for everlasting asking questions of me and interrupting my work. One day she started about fate. “What is it?” she says

“It’s what’s got to be,” says I.

“Suppose,” she says, “I were carrying a pot of jam home from the shop and somebody knocked against me and I dropped it and it broke. Would that be fate?”

“Yes, my dear,” I says.

“And suppose,” she says, “I didn’t drop it, and when I got home I found the man had given me a jar full of golden sovereigns by mistake. Would that be fate?”

“No, my dear,” I says. “That would be a blooming miracle.”

And there’s plenty of grown-up people as ain’t learnt the difference yet. They goes on expecting miracles.

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