Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III ON AMELIA, FLTJES, AND DRAIN-BAMBOOS down your worries," said Nanty, so I must perforce enter Amelia and the kitchen boiler. The boiler won't yield hot water, and Amelia says that isn't her fault, that she wasn't the plumber who put it there, and she can't be expected to get a flue-brush into a hole the size of a threepenny-bit. When I said I thought she put it up the chimney she asked me what for. "To clean the flue, of course," I retorted, a little irritably; and she replied with fine scorn that flues didn't grow up chimneys, but at the backs of firegrates and other un-get-at-able places. Ever since Amelia came to us her object appears to have been the sounding the depths of my ignorance, with the idea of putting us in our proper positions. I don't mean that she wishes to be the mistress exactly, and sit with Dimbie in the drawing- room while I peel potatoes in the back kitchen; but she wishes me to understand that she knows I am a silly sort of creature, and she will do the best she can for me, seeing that she is one of the "oldfashioned sort " who still take a kindly and benevolent interest in their master and mistress. Not that Amelia is old-fashioned really, with flat caps and elastic-sided cloth boots, such as mother's servants wear. She is an entirely modern product. She knows how to do the cake-walk, and wears two- strapped patent slippers, with high Louis heels which turn over at a most dangerous angle, looking more like two leaning towers of Pisa than decorous, respectable "general's" heels. But she is old- fashioned in the sense that she appears to have our interests most tremendously at heart, is quite painfully economical, is forever scrubbing and cleaning, and calls me "mum" instead of "madam" when she isn't calling me "miss." Just n...