Housecarl

“ As in retiring, he was muttering between his teeth some bitter complaints and curses of the Landlord's hardness of heart, the latter seemed to take some pity on the forlorn wayfarer, and called after him, from the door: "Stay, neighbour, let me speak to you: if you wish to rest here, I can accommodate you after all. In that Castle there are empty rooms enow, if they be not too lonely; it is not inhabited, and I have got the keys." Franz accepted the proposal with joy, praised it as a deed of mercy, and requested only shelter and a supper, were it in a castle or a cottage. ”

“ No one can enter any room in the house that is occupied without warning the occupant and receiving permission. Provisions and all household deliveries are made through an ingenious arrangement in the wall at the rear. When Irene; Kohler Andrews; or his wife, who is housekeeper, leaves the place she or he must be let out by someone else, or must utilize a secret passage so far known only to Irene and myself.
“Perhaps you can guess now that I could find for you enough work out here to satisfy your detective instinct. Also, in my day I have been an active man. ”

“ The Housekeeper, for all her deference to the tenants, was a despot, and none of us dared to rebel against her rule and disturb the order she maintained. To anybody coming in from the not too respectable little street the respectability of the house was overwhelming, and I often noticed that strangers, on entering, lowered their voices and stepped more softly. The hush of repose hung heavy on the public hall and stairs, whatever might be going on behind the two doors that faced each other on every landing. ”

“ The light in the lantern is enough to see with, till I go to bed; and when I awake, the sun will be high enough, for I am tired completely, and shall sleep with both eyes."
"I will not hide from you," replied the Landlord, "that a story runs of there being mischief in the Castle, and a Goblin that frequents it. You, however, need not let the thing disturb you; we are near enough, you see, for you to call us, should you meet with aught unnatural; I and my folks will be at your hand in a twinkling, to assist you. Down in the house there we keep astir all night through, some one is always moving. ”

“ Just be patient with me, Charlie, and maybe after a while I'll be as good a housekeeper as your mother was before me. The mistake you and all other men make is, in comparing your wives at the end of their first year of housekeeping with your mothers, whose housekeeping you knew nothing about until it was of ever so many years' duration. I'm young yet, but I'm improving in that matter every day, Charlie. ”

“ On the morrow they gat to the road early enough, and soon began to come amongst the cots and the homesteads, and saw the folk labouring afield, and none were otherwise than friendly to them; and a company of husbandmen, carles and queans, hailed them from the ingle of an acre where they were eating their dinner and bade light down and share, and they did so with a good will; and the upland folk looked with wonder on the Maiden and her beauty, and gave her much worship. But the Carline talked with them, and asked them much of their land and how it sped with them ”

“ In the course of the following fortnight I received, with what emotions I shall not attempt to say, the plan for my bungalow. At that moment it was precisely as if the house was in actual existence. I think the feeling was not unnatural. Of course, a plan is no more a house than a heifer is a tub of butter; but in either case the mere fact that you have acquired the former perceptibly increases your chance of one day getting the latter. ”

“ And after breakfast, as he and Rock stood on the porch, Charlie looked out over the valley with a touch of regret. Four years is a long time, and just that period had elapsed since Rock Holloway came jogging across Lonesome Prairie, to look his first on the silver band of the Marias, to find himself faced at this very ranch with a tragic emergency. And now, Charlie reflected, Rock had a wife and a son and three thousand cattle and a ranch that was a tiny kingdom in itself. They had fought side by side against high-handed thieves. Charlie had drifted, and Rock had taken root. ”

“ While the landlord ran off to get the dog-cart, Thomas was assisted by Goodchild to the cottage which had been the first building seen when the darkness brightened, and was propped up against the garden wall, like an artist’s lay figure waiting to be forwarded, until the dog-cart should arrive from the farm-house below. ”

“ Further down stretch, in unbroken line, the low huts of the farm labourers, in one of which, lying on the High Street, John Clare was born, on the 13th July, 1793. John Clare's parents were among the poorest of the village, as their little cottage was among the narrowest and most wretched of the hundred mud hovels. Originally, at the time when the race of peasant-proprietors had not become quite extinct, a rather roomy tenement, it was broken up into meaner quarters by subsequent landlords, until at last the one house formed a rookery of not less than four human dwellings. ”

“ Half panicky, I dashed across the street and into the cellar, where I hid amongst the junk at the end farthest from the door. In a half hour the town was on fire with excitement. The store was opened and I heard loud voices and the tramp of many feet above me. There was a clattering of horses’ hoofs in the street, and I knew the hue and cry was on. I burrowed deeper into boxes and bales, prepared for a long wait.
When daylight came I saw a pair of stairs leading up to a trapdoor in the store floor. There was much coming and going all day, and the steady hum of voices. ”

“ Frau Hirtel was the domestic little body of whom I rented my airy apartment. Fräulein Anna was her rosy daughter, and this little sunbeam in the house was the only child of the family that I had ever seen; though many and many a time, the name of Karl, the only son and brother, was upon their lips. Karl was a Handwerksbursche,—one of those houseless tradesmen, before dwelt upon; and on this Christmas Karl was expected home from his long, long wanderings. ”

“ Rounded and perfectly kept driveways led to a stable and a commodious garage, beyond which a stone wall divided the estate from a rear street.
Chick turned his steps in that direction after sauntering by the front of the house, taking the opposite side of the fashionable street. He could see no one at any of the windows, many of which were partly open for ventilation at that hour of the morning. ”

“ HOW WE BEGIN LIFE. (Letter from Eva Henderson to Isabelle Courtney.)
My Dear Belle: Well, here we are, Harry and I, all settled down to housekeeping quite like old folks. All is about done but the last things,—those little touches, and improvements, and alterations that go off into airy perspective. I believe it was Carlyle that talked about an "infinite shoe-black" whom all the world could not quite satisfy so but that there would always be a next thing in the distance. Well, perhaps it's going to be so in housekeeping, and I shall turn out an infinite housekeeper ”

“ A servant appeared.
“Ask the housekeeper to come for a moment, please.” Neither spoke till the housekeeper appeared. “Hovey,” he said to the grim woman, “give Mr. Gaston the room in the north tower. Then, from the press in the same room lay out the evening-dress which you will find there.... They were your father’s,” he added, turning to the young man. “It was my wife’s wish to keep them. Have they been aired lately, Hovey?”
“Some days ago, sir.”
“That will do.” The housekeeper left, agitated. “You will probably be in time for the fish,” he added, as he bowed to Robert. ”

“ His household is a model of British propriety. He is cared for by a motherly housekeeper, an eminently correct man-servant, and a large hound of dignified demeanour and a sense of duty that leads him to suspect an enemy in everybody who passes his master's door. His violence in protesting against unobjectionable tenants like ourselves reconciles me to dispensing with a dog, especially as it ends with his bark. ”

“ If you so much as open one of the doors, you will suffer for it.”
“Why should I want to go into the cellars?” asked the lad. “The house and the yard are good enough for me.”
“That is well,” answered the master, and then he mounted a great black steed and rode away.
The lad stayed at home and cleaned and polished and ate and drank. “I wonder what can be in those cellars that my master does not want me to see!” thought the lad. “Not that I mean to look, but it does no harm to wonder about it.”
Every hour the lad stayed there in the house alone he grew more curious about the cellars. ”

“ Our house is in a turmoil from morning till night with women charging in like a mob, or stealing out like conspirators. Their badges, their sandwich boards, their banners lie about in our hall, so much in everybody's way that I sympathized with the infuriated tenant whom I caught one night kicking the whole collection into the cellar. ”

“ But these are inverted garrets, rather than cellars. They are refrigerators for pure air; and they keep a mellow light of their own. When you go into one of them it seems as if the house were standing on its head to express its joy and comfort.
But the Susan House cellar was one of dread, aside from the noise proceeding out of it. Bobaday knew this before they opened a door upon a narrow-throated descent.
One of Zene's stories became vivid. It was a story of a house where nobody could stay, though the landlord offered it rent-free. ”

“ On one side the peaked rough roof had been built out beyond the wall, evidently to serve as a kind of porch. On that wall hung the motliest assortment of things Carley had ever seen—utensils, sheep and cow hides, saddles, harness, leather clothes, ropes, old sombreros, shovels, stove pipe, and many other articles for which she could find no name. The most striking characteristic manifest in this collection was that of service. How they had been used! They had enabled people to live under primitive conditions. ”

“ The instant that I had crossed the threshold the door slammed heavily behind us, and I heard faintly the rattle of the wheels as the carriage drove away.
"It was pitch dark inside the house, and the colonel fumbled about looking for matches, and muttering under his breath. Suddenly a door opened at the other end of the passage, and a long, golden bar of light shot out in our direction. It grew broader, and a woman appeared with a lamp in her hand, which she held above her head, pushing her face forward and peering at us. ”

“ The end-all and be-all of a house is its cellar. The more gloomy, and dark, and generally horrible the cellar, the higher that house ranks socially, and the more likely are you to find in it a general consuming his last hamper from Fortnum & Mason by the light of a tallow dip. And this applies more especially to the Hooge road.
Arrived at the fork, let us turn right-handed and proceed along the deserted road. A motor-car is not to be advised, as at this stage of the promenade one is in full sight of the German trenches. ”

“ The street was thronged with gazers, whose voices were loud in cheerful prediction.
“Ah, holy San Carlo, what a day! The sun comes like a blessing on the young vine-shoots; ay, and on all my rheumatic bones, neighbour Brigitta,” said one old man of the upper class of burghers. ”

“ The difference between former and present-day housekeeping becomes evident when we compare the task of the modern housekeeper—not of the idle woman surrounded by a troop of servants, but of the fairly comfortably situated workingman's wife in a modern flat—with the task of the colonial housekeeper. ”

“ The household consisted of Mr. and Mrs. H——, three sons, Miss H——, my sister and I, and two other guests, Colonel A—— and Major B——.
"We had rooms in the wing on the ground floor of the house, opening off the main hall, divided from the rest of the house by a long passage, and shut off by a swing-door. Our rooms opened off each other, and the inner room opened off a little sitting-room, which had a door with glass panels leading into the passage. The only other person who slept in that wing of the house was Mr. Willie H——, whose room was exactly opposite the door of our room. ”

“ Lady Raleigh, glad of the relief even for the moment, at once began a voluble and minute description of the new flat in Addison Gardens into which they had moved during her daughter's last sojourn in Paris, and this, with certain interjections and questions from Enid, lasted until the brougham turned into the courtyard and drew up in front of the arched doorway out of which the tall, uniformed porter came with the fingers of his left hand raised to the peak of his cap, to open the carriage door. ”

“ And Neale O’Neil is studying at the Main Street Garage every day after school, so he can run a car and take out a license like Joe Eldred. And—”
“But you haven’t a car, Aggie Kenway!” cried Eva Larry, who was one of the most curious.
“Oh, no; not yet,” drawled Agnes, with fine nonchalance. “But we’re having one built for us. Mr. Howbridge himself ordered it for us. And it’s going to be big enough to take out the whole Corner House family.” ”

“ Before the age of Henry VIII., ladies never even went to court, hence there was no great centre of feminine fashion, and one or two handsome gowns lasted a woman of rank a lifetime, without change of cut or ornament. The rooms of her hall or castle were so few and so gloomy, and their furniture so scanty and uncomfortable, that a modern housekeeper would be frightened almost at the description of it, while the neighbourhood in which she lived generally contained all her interests, and bounded the sphere of her ideas. ”