BOY HOUSEMAIDS.

WE have heard of the " boy Paganini," the " boy Raphael," and even of the " boy burglar," and now at last comes the " boy housemaid." " Last come and first

did go" will, we suspect, be the householder's comment. Under the heading of " Drudgery Made Divine," a lady, apparently living in the country, and signing herself " Alice

Hayes," writes to the Daily Chronicle of Saturday last to inform the world that she has disccv -red the "boy house-

maid." He is to be the solution of the great servant question.

Leaning on him for support, the tired and bewildered house- wife is to forget her cares, and to find her home a haven of rest instead of a place of torment. By his gentle aid all the difficulties and perplexities of housekeeping are to disappear as if by magic. When once the broom and the blacklead-brush are placed in his hands, the annoyances and worries will fade and vanish. No more will the lady of the house have to do battle with the maids on the question of fringes and " young men."

He wears no fringe and has no need to be courted by persons who eat up the remains of the grouse and fill the servants' hall with hoarse laughter. He will never toss his head and be

impertinent, nor pry into his mistress's drawers. He will not wish to copy the fashion of her gowns or caricature upon his person her blouses, skirts, and hats. In fact, he will be in all things what a maid-servant ought to be, and in nothing what she ought not to be. We are not exaggerating. The lady who writes in the Daily Chronicle has actually tried the boy housemaid in the flesh, and found him a success. But what one boy can do other boys can do, and therefore the writer in the Daily Chronicle, boldly arguing from her triumphant experiment, bids all oppressed housewives follow in her footsteps, and engage boys instead of women to do their housework. She was led to the momentous .step, which has opened a new vista of hope for her sex, by her experiences of Indian and Chinese service. She found that in China and India all the housework was done supremely well by " boys," and accordingly she argued that the like might happen in England. It is true that the " boys " in China and India are often old men, and that she has employed, and proposes to employ, real boys, but this, as the lawyer would say, is not a material difference. Besides, is not the boy the father of the man P But we must proceed with the argument. " Boys " do housework well in China. Boys could therefore, if need be, do it well in England. Bat maids in England do the housework ill. Therefore boys ought to be substituted for maids in England.

Before we proceed to speak of the carrying out of a practical experiment based on the principles here laid down, we must notice Mrs. Hayes's statement in support of the .assertion that maids are quite unsatisfactory for housework. " Sad to relate," she tells us, " the majority of women regard other women as their natural enemies, and my experience has _shown me that from the moment a woman servant, be she cook, housemaid, general, or what you like, enters a house, until she leaves it, she has, either directly or indirectly, re- garded her mistress rather as an enemy to be fought than as a friend to be trusted." The maid, we are told, will render -cheerful service to the master of the house, as she is not on the defensive against him, "and he, poor, ignorant creature, often gets annoyed with his wife, and wonders why she cannot get on better with Jane or Sarah, who are always so nice and civil to him." But if women are the natural enemies of women, why should not boys be their natural friends? Mrs. Hayes determined to test the question by an experiment, and the success was immediate. " As far as I am personally con- cerned, I will," she declares, " have no more women servants. I kept three here—cook, house-parlourmaid, and general maid to assist, and gave out all the washing; and now I have only a boy ! He does almost all the housework ; I cook our meals, with the aid of Mrs. Beeton's book, and shall continue to do so, until I find a steady, competent man cook who will do what I tell him in the disposal of my food." "A boy and Beeton." There is something very fascinating in this allitera- tive formula for solving the problem of existence. Mrs. Hayes goes on to give us further particulars as to the boy of sixteen at

3s. a week and " all found," including aprons and slippers and a suit of clothes. " I gave him his list of work and turning- out days' for the different rooms and the stair-rod and silver day,' and the only help I give is in making the beds and so arranging the bedroom work of rooms used by ladies that he carries away the pails of dirty water, brings up clean water, and sweeps and dusts the rooms. My tea and bath-water he brings to the bedroom door every morning at a fixed time, knocks at the door, and leaves them, so I have no difficulty about the bedroom work ; for, of course, I manage my own house-linen, as I did when I had three servants, and make my own washing list, as, I suppose, every housewife does." Mrs. Hayes goes on to describe how, when she comes down at 8 o'clock she finds everything got ready for cooking the breakfast. "I cut the bread, the boy toasts it, and takes the breakfast into the room. Quite simple, is it not P" After again expressing her satis- faction in the way she has "worked this boy idea," and dwell- ing on the reduction "in mental worry," she ends in an almost lyrical vein with advice to her fellow-sufferers. "' Pluck up ; try a boy. Sigh not so, but let them go.' Get Mrs. Beeton's cookery-book and a boy as a last resource, and let us in future turn to the boys who are growing up, and who might other- wise go to swell the ranks of the ' great unemployed.'" There is, we confess, something quite contagious in the cheery enthusiasm of these words, and, at first, the ordinary man, completely carried away by Mrs. Hayes's "boy idea," will ask, " Why not save one's wife now and on the instant from her natural enemies P Give all the maids warning, and instal the g irden-boy and the stable-boy in their place !"

Such, we believe, will be the first wild thought that will surge within the male breast as he thinks of all the misery that the household must unconsciously have been suffering from those pleasant-voiced and apparently amiable maids. While they were petting the master of the house they bad been treating their mistress to every sort of annoyance and indignity. It is too monstrous. The thing must not be borne for another instant, especially when that amiablo creature, the boy housemaid, could set it all right in moment. Alas for the vanity of human schemes. The mistress of the house, when the proposal is made to her, will, we venture to think, put quite a new face on the situation.

She will entirely refuse to be converted to the notion that she is a deeply injured woman. She will not even admit that the maids are her natural enemies, and any hypothetical boy of sixteen her natural friend. Indeed, her instinct will be to hold just the reverse opinion. She will point out that she never fights with her maids, that they never subject her to petty annoyances ; and she will go on to ask very perti- nently whether the doings of the garden-boy and the stable- boy are of a kind that give support to the notion that if put into apron and slippers they will prove ideal housemaids. And who on reflection can say that the experience of man- kind in general does give any support to the boy-housemaid idea ? The page is not by any means an unknown quantity in our households,—but what is be known for P For a look of blue-eyed innocence in the parlour, and for a career of un- bridled wilfulness in the kitchen. If any mischief is possible of perpetration, he perpetrates it. The notion of his being allowed to help wash-up when there is company, is scouted as utterly impossible. " We daren't let him touch a thing ma'am," says the parlourmaid. " He broke six wine-glasses at once by throwing them all into the pantry sink together to save time, and the other day, if cook hadn't just caught him in time, he'd have smashed all the best tea-things by letting drop the tray which he tried to balance on one hand while he was palling the cat's tail with the other. There's no dependence on the boy at all, and even his own work isn't done as it should be. As master noticed the other day, the knives is almost like saws, he's chipped the edges so on the board." Can we suppose that except in the rarest of cases the boy housemaid would be more satis- factory ? We should like to see—but oh, not to taste—the tea and thin bread-and-butter brought to one's door by the boy housemaid. We know what tea is like when it is made with hot, not boiling, water, and can guess what bread-and- butter resembles when the bread is hacked irregularly with

an oniony knife, and the butter is laid on in such a way that it looks like a yellow veneer. Fanny, too, a boy housemaid making a bed! He might, no doubt, construct an apple-pie

bed with great dexterity, and probably could hardly be re- strained from doing so on April 1st, but to lie on such a bed, —Hic labor, hoc opus est. And the sight would be worse even than the feel. Outside certain palaces in India is a wall on which are seen imprinted in red paint the hand-prints of the Queens as they rode to the Suttee. Something not unlike this rite would be sure to be practised by one's boy house-

., maid, but in black rather than in red. Imagine turning down one's bed to find two or three fine thumb-marks, or maybe a whole hand, silhouetted in coal-dust on one's sheets. And then think of the orgy which would take place when the boy " turned out" the drawing-room. That mystic process is .not unlikely to diminish one's collection of china even when practised by a woman. Think of the pandemonium pro- duced by a boy—vases destroyed and sofas overthrown—and -raging through the chaos of his own creation, his broom borne aloft like a battle-axe, the boy housemaid. The picture called up of "the stair-rod and silver day" is not less harrowing. How a strong and willing boy would stove " in the sides of the old Caroline drinking-cups, wrench the ornamental rings off the punch-bowl, and make the great sugar-castor stand all awry. The stair-rods might come out, but would they ever go back ? But there is no use in pur- suing the matter further. We leave the boy housemaid before he attempts to lay the cloth for dinner ; nor will we endeavour to canvass the fate of that household which should attempt to have a whole staff of boy servants. Yet such houses there must be, if we are to adopt Mrs. Hayes's advice. One boy could not " do for " a family of ten, unless, indeed, loy inducing suicide. The big families must have a couple of boy housemaids and a boy parlourmaid, and even a boy " up- -and-down girl." But think for a moment of what would come of a servants' ball of boys. Canning, speaking of the meetings of the Directory, describes "the frequent inkstand hurtling through the air." In such a servants' hall as that of which we speak, it would be the chairs and knives and forks that would hurtle. Each course would be a free-fight, and legs of _mutton would have to be barred, because of the easiness with which a free-spirited boy could use them as a club. No, we shall not help ourselves by taking to boy housemaids :—

" Better all the whims of Mary than a boy at half her pay."

Besides, there is a great deal of nonsense in all this talk of the badness of servants. Of course there are bad servants, just as there are bad mistresses, and always will be, but in spite of that the normal housemaid and parlourmaid are very efficient. They have the passions of their kind ; but if they -are not worried by impertinent suggestions as to their religious views, their matrimonial intentions, and the form of head-gear, coiffure, and costume affected by them out of office hours, they are very efficient. We doubt, indeed, if the world -can anywhere produce anything more efficient in the way of

service than that rendered by the capable British maid- servant. She has her feelings and her rights, but she is neither a thief nor sloven, and knows how to respect herself and her mistress. After this are we to decline on a boy of sixteen with dirt-begrimed hands, a smutty face, and a love of mischief for its own sake, found otherwise only in the ape -or the jackdaw ?