24 JUNE 1865, Page 13

AMERICAN SERVANTS.

To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."

Sin,—Your American correspondent, "A Yankee," says in his letter of June 2 that "Europeans who know anything about this country know that Yankee women, not to say men, are never found in our houses as servants. Our cooks, housemaids, waiters, coachmen, and grooms all come from Europe, or are negroes."

That foreign service abounds in the United States is unques- tionable, but to say that there is no other is to contradict the abundant evidence of the best American writers. Bute, the hero's coachman in Bayard Taylor's Hannah Thurston, Ruth in Mrs. Follen's Sketches of Married Life, and Roxy in Mrs. Sedgwick's Alida are marked specimens of American servants. So are

Philetus, Cynthy, and Barby in Miss Wetherell's Queechy. Miss Sedgwick has written an excellent tale, Live and Let Live, consist-

ing of the history of an American servant girl from her first "service place" to her last, and Mrs. Stowe, in her House and Home Papers, recently published, discusses at some length the special subject of the relations between American servants and American mistresses, with a view to harmonize the well-known difficulties with which those relations are beset. It is impossible to believe that all these delineations and discussions are without