DOMESTIC SERVICE.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "•SPEOTATOR."] SIR,—As you allow the ladies to have their say in your newspaper, I hope you will allow a servant to say a word. No one seems to have noticed the most important thing in a " Satisfied Mistress's" letter. She says all the work is done in the morning. That shows she insists on the servants rising early. It is through having to get up early, at half-past six, most servants lose their health, and the doctors say we should rest as much as we can with our feet up. How can we if we have to rise at halfpast six and also go out bicycling ? None of my family, nor many of my friends, ever had bad health till we went out to service. Mother had seven children, and she and father and all of us were always in good health working on the farm. We never knew what illness was. Of course mother and father had always to get up at four in the morning, and now she is sixty, and a grandmother, and feels she cannot do what she used to. And the docter says it is nothing
whatever but the early rising has brought on the feeling of weak- ness, and she should not have done it. She was working early and late, both on the farm and looking after us all and cooking our food and making our clothes and her own. There is nothing but an eight-hour day will bring justice to us all, and we servants are determined to have it. The gentlefolk do not get up at half- past. six. We have to take in trays of tea to them from seven to eight in the morning. And why should not we have the same? The husband of one of my sisters always takes up a cup of tea and a slice of bread to her and her girls before he goes out in the morning. And a lady •I know, a real lady, always takes a cup of tea to the maids' room before they dress in the morning.—I am,
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