servants were obliged to call Mrs. Hoskins—“Mrs.” being a title of dignity, not of marriage—or Cook at the lowest, and who was called everything by her old boy John Leslie and his son Jack, from Maggie to Magsibus, and answered to anything by which her two masters chose to name her. 

 “Oh, you have been as keen as any one in the family about Magsy's present,”—and Leslie still clung to hope,—“but I've walked out before you all. What do you think of a first-class likeness of Spurgeon in an oak frame, with his autograph? You know how she goes on about him, and reads his sermons. It 'ill be hung in the place of honour in the kitchen, with burnished tin and brass dishes on either side. Now, confess, haven't I scored?”  

 “If you propose to put your picture on her table on Christmas morning, I fear you will be a day late, for Margaret has given up her place, and asked to be allowed to leave to-morrow: she wants to bid Jack good-bye before she goes,” and Mrs. Leslie's voice was iced to twenty degrees below freezing. 

 “What do you mean?” cried Leslie, aghast, for in all his dark imaginations he had never anticipated this catastrophe. “Maggie! our Meg! leaving at a day's notice! It's too absurd! You've... had a quarrel, I suppose, but that won't, come to anything. Christmas is the time for... making up.”  

 “You do not know much about household management, John,” Mrs. Leslie explained with much dignity. “Mistresses don't quarrel with servants, however much provoked they may be. If I have to find fault, I make a rule of doing so quickly and civilly, and I allow no reply. It was Margaret flung up her place with very unbecoming language; and you may be sure this time there will be no 'making up,' as you call it. 

 “What happened, Florence?” said John Leslie, with a note in his voice which a woman never treats with disrespect. “You know I do not interfere between you and the young servants, but Margaret has been with us since we married, and before that was for sixteen years in my father's house. We cannot part lightly; did she speak discourteously to you?”  

 “I do not know what a man may call discourtesy, but Margaret informed me that either she or the housemaid must leave, and that the sooner the housemaid went the better for the house.”  

 “But I thought that the housemaid was a Baptist too, and that Margaret and she got on capitally, and rather looked down on the waitress because she was a Methodist.”  

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