That servants are the plague of life seems to be an accepted axiom amongst English ladies of the upper middle class. When I hear them discussing their grievances over their afternoon tea, I wish them no worse fate than to have the management of an Australian household for a week. It is not every Englishwoman whose peace of mind would survive the trial. Many a young English wife have I seen unhappy in her married life in the colonies, mainly on account of her domestics. And yet I doubt whether the colonial mistress makes as much fuss about her real wrongs as the English one about her imaginary grievances. Of course she can, if drawn out, tell you enough ridiculous stories about her servants to fill a number of _Punch_; but if they are only fools she is well content, and it is only when she is left servantless for two or three days that she waxes wroth.
Where mistresses are many and servants are few, it goes almost without saying that large establishments are out of the question. Given equal incomes, and the English mistress has twice as many servants as the Australian, and what is more, twice as competent ones. Even our friend Muttonwool only has six coachman, boy, cook, housemaid, nurse, and parlourmaid. I don't suppose there are a hundred households in all Australia which keep a butler pure and simple, though there must be several thousand with what is generically known as a man-servant, who gets twenty-five shillings a week, all found. A coachman's wages are on the average about the same. The 'boy' gets ten shillings. Man-cooks are rare. A decent female cook, who ranks out here as first-class, earns from fifteen shillings to a pound a week. For this sum she is supposed to know something about cooking; yet I have known one in receipt of a weekly guinea look with astonishment at a hare which had been sent to her master as a present, and declare that it was 'impossible to make soup out of that thing.' After a little persuasion she was induced to try to make hare-soup after Mrs. Beeton's recipe, but the result was such as to try the politeness of her master's visitors. This lack of decent cooks is principally due to the lack of establishments large enough to keep kitchenmaids. Would-be cooks have no opportunity of acquiring their art by training from their superiors; they gain their knowledge by experiments on their employers' digestions; never staying long in one place, they learn to make some new dishes at each house they go to, and gradually rise in the wages-scale.