I seem to have wandered a long way from Eileen, but it was really she who brought the birds to my mind.

I got up early the morning after our arrival, in order to show her the way about, and because it is not one of my daily duties to be the first down in the morning, I noticed all the more how the opening of the doors and windows, to let in the day, is something much more than the mere undoing of locks and latches. There is nothing to compare with the inrush of sweet morning air that greets you on the threshold, as you take your first look-out on a dew-sparkling garden, probably all alive with the songs and chirps and twitters of the birds, and teeming with the scents of things seen and unseen, each pouring forth its gratitude in its own way for the ever-new miracle of the sun’s return.

This letting in of light and clean air, sunshine, song and scent, after the inanimate darkness of the night, is so wonderfully symbolic that it seems a mistake that it has come to be regarded as one of the inferior domestic tasks, relegated to the minor members of the household. And though I am not one of those exceptionally virtuous people who habitually rise at six o’clock, waking every one else within earshot and taking vain pride in their performances, whenever I chance to be the first one to welcome the morning and let in the day, I feel there are decided compensations for the wrench of getting out of bed minus a cup of tea.

I also realize how easy it is, in the flush of exhilaration produced by the early morning air, to make oneself a nuisance to all who are less energetic. For some unaccountable reason, when I am down extra early, I always want to bustle about, and do all sorts of rackety things that never occur to me on the days when I do not put in an appearance till breakfast is ready.

I had opened the windows in the living-room, and had set Eileen to make the fire, and was seeing to things in the kitchen, when she followed me with an excited squawk: “Oh, ma’am, there’s somebody has lost their canary! It was on the window ledge just now, and it’s flown into a tree. Have you got a bird-cage handy? I expect I could catch it. There it is again”—pointing to a handsome yellow and black tit who was pecking eagerly at some bacon rind I had just hung up outside the window.

I explained.

“Wild, is he? Wild?” she exclaimed; “and don’t they charge you nothing for them?”

She finished the room with one eye perpetually on the windows.

Having a healthy appetite, that had been touched up a little extra with the hill-top air, she was more than willing to help me get the meal ready. I made the usual preliminary inquiries as to her experience in regard to cooking, and was surprised to hear that she had actually won a silver medal at a Cookery Exhibition.

Surely this was unexpected good fortune, and I asked myself if I really deserved such a heaven-sent boon as a silver-medalled cook! I decided, however, that in view of all I had undergone in the past at the hands of those who were not so decorated, it was nothing more than my due that I should be so blessed in my declining years. My only regret was that war-time would allow so little scope for her genius!

Feeling very light-hearted, and wondering how she would get on with Abigail when cook gave one of her periodical notices and I placed Eileen on the permanent staff, I said: “Then I needn’t bother about the breakfast! We will have poached eggs on toast. I’ll lay the cloth while you get them ready.”

But she looked at me doubtfully. “We didn’t ever have poached eggs at the boarding-house,” she began. “But I think I know how to do ’em. You just break them on the gridiron over the top of the fire, don’t you?”

After all, it was I who poached the eggs, while Eileen explained that the medal had been awarded to the cookery class at the orphanage en bloc, for making a Swiss roll.... No, unfortunately, she didn’t know how to make Swiss roll either, as she had been down with scarlet fever that term. Still, it was her class that got the medal, so of course she had as much right to it as anyone else.

I trust I bore the disappointment complacently. I’m fairly hardened to such sudden drops in the kitchen thermometer.

The great thing about Eileen was her willingness, and her anxiety to learn.

When I was seeking to impart knowledge, however, she seemed to think it was for her also to contribute some general information. Hence our duologues often ran on these lines:—

“When you make the tea or coffee, be sure that the water is quite boiling; or else——”

“Yes, ma’am. Do you know, one of the young gentlemen where I used to live, couldn’t help being bald, no matter if he used a whole bottle of hair restorer every day. It ran in his fambly.”

“Really! Well, now we’ll fry some bacon. You put a little of the bacon fat from this jar into the pan first of all to get hot. Like this.”

“Yes, ma’am. Isn’t it strange, grandmother won’t never have red roses in her bonnet. Can’t bear red.”

She also excelled in asking questions; from morn till eve life seemed one long series of conundrums which I was expected to answer. I never realized before how many queries country life presents; hitherto it had seemed to me such a simple, straightforward state of existence.

An old man had been secured to do an occasional odd day’s work (at highest London prices). He described some misfortune that, last autumn, had befallen “Hussy,” the cow who comes for change of air into my orchard at intervals—an apple she had eaten (one of mine, of course) being blamed for the fact that her milk turned off, “like vinegar ’twas.”

Eileen—in common with every other young human under twenty years of age—thrilled at the word apple, and inquired if “Hussy” had stolen it off a tree?

“Stolen it off a tree!” scoffed the man; “and why should she bother to creek her neck up’ards when they was lying by the thousand as thick on the ground in that thur orchard as—as—well, as apples!”

Eileen looked incredulous.

“Yes, by the thousand they was, and not wuth picking up, no one wanted ’em; no men to make cider; no sugar to jam ’em; child’un all got colic a’ready as bad as bad could be, couldn’t swaller no more; too damp to keep. Ay, and we that short o’ cider as we be!” And the aged one—who had been coining money hand over fist, with letter carrying, and the sale of eggs and poultry, and a couple of pigs, and the hay in his paddock, to say nothing of gilt-edged easy little jobs waiting for him all about the place at any price per hour he cared to charge, and old age pensions paid regularly to himself and wife—paused to shake his head and sigh over the misfortunes of the times.

Eileen was likewise moved. To think of it—unwanted apples! And no one to eat them! She reverted to the phenomenon several times that day, with such queries as these:—If eating one apple turns the cow’s milk to vinegar, would eating fifty turn it to cider? If so, wouldn’t it be cheaper to make the cow grow cider, as the old man said cider had riz to 7d. a quart, and milk was only 6d. You would then make a penny a quart profit that you could put into the Savings Bank to help the War.

After watching some vegecultural operations she inquired: “Why is it, when he puts potatoes in the ground and beans in the ground all the same way, the beans come out at the top of the plant and the potatoes come out at the bottom?”

Another time it was: “What do they use the sting of the nettle for?” And when she had enlarged her garden vocabulary, she inquired: “Is a spider an annual or a perennial?”

“I can’t find a tap out there to turn off the water,” and she indicated the spring outside the gate, tumbling out of a little wooden trough wedged in among the rocks, into a pool below. “I suppose they stop it at the main. What time do they turn it off?... Never? It runs like that always! Then how long is it before the whole lot runs away and it’s all dried up? And don’t they ever come down on you for wasting the water?”

Yet more accomplished people than Eileen have often surprised one by their ignorance. An experienced and supposed-to-be-highly-qualified cook came to me one day with the sad news that we couldn’t have any stuffing with the duck for dinner that day as there wasn’t a single bottle of herbs in the house. I reminded her that there was an almost unlimited amount of everything in the garden, including a sage bush growing on a wall that now measures 15 feet by 6 feet. “In the garden?” she repeated in surprise. “But I didn’t know it was good unless it was bottled! You don’t mean that country people use those things raw?”

I felt such an apologetic cannibal as I explained!

She it was who split up the chopping board to light the fire, the first morning after her arrival, because she couldn’t find a bundle of firewood anywhere. On being referred to the stack of dry kindling wood in the coal shed—she had never heard of lighting fires with trees before; never thought, indeed, to live with a family that expected you to do such things!

On one occasion, when I was in one of the largest and poorest of the London Elementary Schools, where the children looked as pitifully sordid and poverty-stricken as I have ever seen them, I asked a few questions of one small girl in the front row of a class. Her outside dress consisted of an old dilapidated waistcoat worn over a dingy flannelette nightgown, while a ragged piece of serge fastened around the waist with a safety-pin did duty for a skirt. But she was only one among a classful of rags and tatters.

“What is your name?” I asked, by way of starting conversation.

“Victorine,” the forlorn-looking little thing replied.

“And what is your lesson about?” I then inquired.

“Therdelfykorrickul,” she informed me.

Seeing the bewildered look on my face, the head mistress, who was showing me round, said, “Enunciate your words more carefully, Victorine, and speak slowly.”

Victorine understood what “speak slowly” meant, and so she said very deliberately, “The—Delphic—Horricul.”

“So you are learning about the Delphic Oracle. And what are you going to do when you grow up?” was my next query.

“I’m going to work in the laundry like muvver!”

We went into another classroom; here more ragged unwashed clothes greeted me on every hand. I had no need to ask the subject of the lesson, for the girls were facing a blackboard on which was written “The Characteristics of Shelley’s Poetry.”

After I had seen more tatters in a third room, where a lesson was being given on “Infinitive Verbs,” I said to the head mistress, “If I had this school, do you know what I should do? I should take a class at a time, and give out needles and cotton, and tell them to do the best they could to sew up the rags in their dresses and their pinafores. I would not mind if they did not put on patches even to a thread in the regulation way, so long as they made some attempt to run together those rents and slits and yawning gaps. I would let the other lessons go till this was done. And I would not let a girl take her place in a class in the morning till she had mended as well as she could any rents she had worn to school.”

The head mistress shook her head. “That would not be practical; you see, it isn’t in the Syllabus.”

I don’t pretend to understand the inwardness of syllabuses, but I couldn’t help wondering if there wasn’t an opening here for a new one. While so much unpractical stuff is taught to the poorer classes in elementary schools, is it any wonder that the children know so little of the things appertaining to daily life?

Eileen didn’t exactly suffer from rags. She was as neat and patched and wholesome as her clean, sensible grandmother could make her; but she was forlorn-looking to the last degree. One of the first things I tried to do was to get her to take a little pride in her personal appearance. And it was wonderful how she responded. With her hair released from the uncompromising, tight screw that had been kept in place by three big iron-looking hair-pins, and done higher up, and more loosely over the forehead, and a pretty collar and blue bow for her Sunday blouse, she looked a different being.

“Poor little thing, she has never had a soul take any interest in how she looks,” Ursula remarked to me. “And even though we’re not allowed to cast our bread upon the waters, nowadays, they haven’t said anything officially about ribbons.” And so we searched our drawers for suitable finery that might bring a little colour into Eileen’s hitherto drab outlook. Virginia followed suit, remarking that she liked to scatter little seeds of kindness by the wayside, since you never know what may result.

True! She didn’t!

Meanwhile, Eileen gloated over the odds and ends, fixing weird and crazy-looking bows to her black sailor hat, draping her shoulders with bits of lace to see if they would make a collar, and standing in front of the kitchen glass trying the effect of pinks and purples under her chin.

For a time, the questions ceased.