THE SQUIRE 215 



servants drive out the lady's-maid, lend the butler 

 and valet horses, convey them or their friends to the 

 railway-station, pick out their confidantes among the 

 lower servants to praise them to " in fact, make 

 those upper servants masters, and trust to them for 

 keeping right with the real employer. "It is no 

 matter how good a stableman a man may be," he 

 says, " unless he stands well with the people in the 

 steward's room, for there is the real dominion. 

 There is none of this," he adds, "in the house of the 

 well-regulated country Squire, where every servant 

 stands on his own merit, and the master and mistress 

 can see who do their duty, without trusting to what 

 other servants say or think." 



Our correspondent, as we said before, being in 

 Paris, concludes his sensible letter with the following 

 observations on the difference between English and 

 French servants. " I was surprised," he writes, " to 

 find so many English stablemen here, some very bad, 

 some good. The English one is always preferred, 

 because, in the first place, he is brought from a good 

 practical school; and, secondly, if he is of the right 

 sort, he will be working whether his master is looking 

 at him or not, whereas ' monsieur ' always wants his 

 employer to see how busy he is." That is a very 

 capital description of a workman and a "make 

 believe," and one that will apply to a great many 

 English as well as French Grooms. We have seen 

 fellows who did not know how to be hurrying and 

 bustling enough when their masters were by, and yet 

 who could employ themselves for a whole morning in 

 jingling a curb chain or scouring a stirrup iron, when 

 there was no one looking on. The great mischief of 

 great houses, as we said before, is keeping more 

 servants that can by any possibility be worked. This 

 is what people call keeping up their station ; and 

 though we are far from wishing to see great people 

 degenerate into little ones, we should be very sorry 



