SETTING UP A BUTLER.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume VI, Issue 314, 5 March 1875, Page 3

SETTING UP A BUTLER.

There are various forms of human suffering which must excite the compassion of any beings of a superior order who may have an opportunity of contemplating them. The' 7 ' good l 'man struggling with adversity is proverbially a touching spectacle ; but we are not at all sure that the good man struggling with the consequences of his. own prosperity is not sometimes more deserving of commiseration, especially as his unhappiness does not usually excite much sympathy or pity among his friends. There are perhaps few kinds of misery so trying as that if the rising middle class man who has bem getting on in the world, extending his practice or his business, accumulating a comfortable balance, and laying up a stock cf social consideration, and who finds hitvself on the brink of a.great domestic revokdon, which is the natural result of the good fortune which has hi!herto been so sweet to him. He has of course been more or less distinctly aware since he started as head of a household of a gradual development of domestic—we will not say comfort, and luxury, in the true sense of the word, would be still more out of place—but perhaps we may say display. The snug villa, in its garden, at TulseHill or Holloway, where he began life with Arabella, has been exchanged for a more pretentious dwelling nearer the centre of fashionable life,, first perhaps in Bayswater or Regents Pork, and -then, as Arabella's views' expanded, in the aspiring outskirts of South Kensington. The cook and housemaid of the primitive family have also been growing into a numerous retinue of female servanta—cook and kitchenmaid, first and second housemaid, parlormaid, nurse and under-nurse, and perhaps a "boy. It is sometimes of the little things of life that one has most reason to be afraid, and •if our friend had been wise, he would have had an uncomfortable presentiment when he saw the boy become a member of his establishment. The theory of development has undoubtedly-its place in -the domestic as in the animal world, and Wordsworth himself perhaps scarcely realised to the full extent all that 'i3-meant by the melancholly trulh that the child is father tcTthe man. To the eye of thesocial physician the irruption of the boy in buttons, who is surreptitiously introduced into the area to clean the knives, and boots, is painfully ominous. Every doctor watches such signs. It may be only a little flush or a scarcely visible pimple, but to the observant eye it betokens unmistakably what is about to follow. In a suburban house perhaps a boy does not much matter. There is a garden whore he can be turned loose when not wanted indoors ; or there is probably a pony-chaise, and he can make-believe to be • useful to the groom. At any rate you know the worst of him. When he outgrows his jacket and trousers so that there is too much exposure of bare arm and dirty stocking, he must of course give place to another ; but that other will only be a boy such as he used to be himself. The danger of the boy in a town house is that he is the thin end of the wedge—the most inevitable pre- -j cursor of a man.

It may be supposed that with the increase of the domestic staff a certain change also takes place in the life of the household. There are more courses than there used to be at tabic, evening dress creeps in, and the range of hospitality widens. The boy having been added at the tail of the establishment, another male is found to be indispensible at the head of it. In short, our friend suddenly awakes to the . discovery that he is in that most dispensing position which may be described as tottering on the verge of a butler.—' Saturday Review.'

Holloway's Pills. —Diarrhoea and Bowel Complaints.—These maladies are ever present, and if left unattended frequently terminate fatally. It. should he everywhere known that both cholera and diarrhoaa originate in the presence of some undigested substance in the stomach or hovvels, or of some deleterious matter in the blood, and that Holloway's Pills can expel either with ep.se and expedition. They combine in a surprising degree purifying, alterative, regulating, and strengthening qualities, and thus ex"rt over every internal ovgau the wholesomely controlling influence so necessary for subduing excessive actiou in ilio lium-m frame. Holloway's modifine may be advantageously taken &s a means ■■{ lreppin.fr Ihe Moor] piirp »nd (hp body •'•on' -the only practical plan of maintaining j health iu youth, manhood in old age-. '