Housecarle

“ 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. ”

“ Sometimes two or three carriages might be descried in the evening coming up to the door through the Lombardy poplar avenue—the usual approach to many old houses—whereupon ensued a lively flutter among small servants, who speedily got them into their clean aprons, and ran to open gates, and remove parcels from carriages, and becoming generally excited. Lady visitors were always accompanied by colored maids, although sure of finding a superfluity of these at each establishment. The mistress of the house always received her guests in the front porch, with a sincere and cordial greeting. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When the carriage drove from the door, the housekeeper came in to bring the maids new white gloves. I repeated to her the words I had just heard, that that dear lady miss Saville was going to be married to papa, and that she was to live with us, and be my mamma.
The housekeeper shook her head, and said, "Poor thing! how soon children forget every thing!" ”

“ Clement Searle. What would come of it?
Before many minutes the housekeeper waited upon us—a fresh rosy little old woman in a clean dowdy cap and a scanty sprigged gown; a quaint careful person, but accessible to the tribute of our pleasure, to say nothing of any other. She had the accent of the country, but the manners of the house. Under her guidance we passed through a dozen apartments, duly stocked with old pictures, old tapestry, old carvings, old armour, with a hundred ornaments and treasures. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When the house he is to call at is reached, he should knock and return to the carriage for orders. In closing the door upon the family, he should see that the handle is securely turned, and that no part of the ladies' dress is shut in. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every detail of the strange house, with its luxurious furnishings, its cleverly contrived appointments, breathed a horribly suggestive degree of power, a deadly purpose, and an organisation swayed by a master mind; and, grim evidence of the merciless, inexorable length to which they would go, was the ghastly white face of the dead chauffeur, bound hand and foot, in the chair before him!
That empty glass in the hand of one of the men! He could not take his eyes from it—except as his eyes were drawn magnetically to that full glass in the hand of one of the others. ”

“ 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 ”

“ In the evening, when her day's work is done, the modern housekeeper will light the gas or—better still—turn on the electric light, and settle down to read or sew in a cheerfully lighted room. The colonial housekeeper often contented herself with sitting by the fire in a room lighted only by the red glow from the hearth. ”

“ While he was eating his breakfast, the old gentleman found he had forgotten his pocket-handkerchief; and went up to his room to get it. And such was the promptitude of that old-fashioned household, that the village being close to the house, and the bell-hanger living in the village, the master’s orders had already been obeyed, and the bell-hanger was already in the room, standing on a ladder, arranging the new wire of the bell. In old-fashioned houses, you know, the bell wires come through the wall and go round the top of the room, so that you can see them, and so it was in this house in Kent. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Leaving the house for the second time that day and going downtown, his ears were assailed by the cries of the newsboys, who were selling extra editions based on the strange crime—murder or abduction.
He went to the last place of residence given him by the girl.
Ringing the bell, he inquired for the landlady.
It was a cheap but respectable boarding house, suited to the means of a girl who was compelled to make her living standing behind the counter of a large dry-goods store. ”

“ Our beautiful house, our horses and carriage, and nearly all of our servants, are gone.”
“No matter for that,” returned Master Horace. “Father has paid all his debts like an honest man, and we have all we need. A small house is just as comfortable as a large one; the cars and omnibuses answer as good a purpose as our own carriage ”

“ 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. ”

“ You have seen some slim, slip-shod housekeeper, at midnight ferreting over a rambling old house in the country, startling at fancied witches and ghosts, yet intent on seeing every door bolted, every smouldering ember in the fireplaces smothered, every loitering domestic abed, and every light made dark. ”

“ When the good woman of the cottage goes out for half-an-hour to fetch a pail of water, or to gossip with a neighbour, she always leaves the door-key in the keyhole outside. The house is, in fact, at the mercy of any one who chooses to turn the key and enter. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ There is, too, a suspicion of comfort in the strip of matting that covers the floor, in the naked gaslight which flares in its wire cage by day and night, in the table and chair, and the plain comfortable bed. This is the condemned cell. A dozen paces from its threshold is a door that leads to another part of the yard, and a dozen more paces along the flagged pathway brings you to a little unpretentious one-storeyed house without windows, and a doorway sufficiently wide to allow two men to pass abreast. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The great families, for instance, entertained a strong dislike to having servants to board and sleep in their houses, and the consequence of this was that ladies, on returning from some grand party or other in a gorgeous carriage with two footmen behind, dressed in rich liveries and hats loaded with plumes and feathers, used to descend from their chariots, light their solitary night-lamps from the flambeaux of their departing footmen, and then sadly creep up to bed amidst the dreary and dismal solitude of a dark and deserted mansion. ”

“ He cast an anxious glance toward the garage. "Now get away from here unless you want to give everything away!"
"I didn't know anyone was around," the housekeeper muttered. She turned and fled into the house. ”

“ Between the streets of the rich and parallel to them, run the alleys of the poor. The rich man’s garage jostles elbows with the poor man’s dwelling.
In a big house fronting on one of the most fashionable streets lived a little girl named Ethel. Other people lived in the big house also, a father, a mother, a butler, a French maid, and a host of other servants. Back of the big house was the garage. Facing the garage on the other side of the alley was a little, old one-story-and-a-half brick house. In this house dwelt a little girl named Maggie. ”

“ This belief prevails in the north, and there the home-made dress indicated, which is of a reddish-brown colour, is frequently seen.
Houses and Lands.—There should be placed below the foundation of every house a cat’s claws, a man’s nails, and a cow’s hoofs, and silver under the door-post. These will prove omens of the luck to attend the house. If an outgoing tenant leaves the two former below the door it is unfortunate for the incoming tenant, as his cattle will die.
An expectant occupier, or claimant, will secure to himself possession of land by burning upon it a little straw. ”