Indian Women as Servants

There had come in our company as maids, three or four women, who were wives of the serving men; but so far as caring for the houses of the gentlemen, they were of little use, not understanding how to do a housewife's duty with none of the English conveniences at hand.

Therefore it was that the Indian women had taken it upon themselves to do the work of servants, not thinking it beneath them, and very well ordered under such hands were our homes, save, perhaps, not kept in as cleanly a fashion as one could have desired. The huts we were then living in could not be so orderly as houses built of wood or of stone, for with the bare ground as floor, on which must be laid everything not in use, owing to the absence of closets and pantries, it was impossible for the hard-working savages to do exactly as our gentlemen would have them.

Mayhap an English housewife would have said we lived in a slovenly fashion; but to my thinking, we were as cleanly lodged and fed as we had been on shipboard.

The woman who took charge of our home, cooking the food for my uncle, my father, and myself, had two boys nearly my own age, and with them, when there was no work on hand requiring my time, I wandered afoot through the green forests, until I came to know every path and trail, even as one knows the lanes and byways of his English home.