BOOKS FOR THE HOUSEWIFE.
Domestic Service. By An Old Servant. (Constable.) This is a very charming and naive description of her life by an old servant. It hardly, however, bears upon the chief domestic problem of to-day, as almost the whole of the author's service was passed.in large houses with housekeepers and butlers who were obvious experts of the etiquette of the servants' hall. The book is a little muddled, as it is not always possible to say whether " An Old Servant " is recounting her own experience or somebody else's. There is only one short section which bears on the single servant house and that is early in the book, when the author is sent out as a general servant but remarks that though the work was hard for one so young, she was treated like one of the family. That, as has been said before in these columns, is the true solution of the single servant house problem. The rest of the book describes, as indicated, households on a very large scale. Interesting statistics are given as to female domestic service being the largest single industry that exists, and the writer's indebtedness to the Domestic Servants' Benevolent Institution is gratefully acknowledged. The book is a wonderful achieve- ment for an author who left school, as stated in its pages, at the early age of ten.
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