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A Svenska Maid.
Marie has been in the United States about four years, and still accents
her English with the Lapp-Finn modulations of Northern Sweden. She is
only eighteen years old now. She has fair hair and a serene fair face
somewhat like the Liberty face on our silver dollar. Her young shape is
strong and handsome, and she has white little teeth like a child's, and
the innocent nature of a child.
Marie's father is a Swedish farmer. Many adventurers came to America
from her neighborhood, and, though but fourteen years old, she wanted to
come too; and a cousin's husband, already settled in Illinois, lent her
the passage-money. The last Sunday, according to custom, all her friends
brought offerings to church, and she was made to go through the
congregation holding her apron. They filled it with cake, a Bible, etc.
The young people walked with her parents and herself to the
steamer-landing, and kept from crying until she was aboard.
When the steamer was under way an old woman came across her in the
steerage, and exclaimed, "Why, child, where are your father and mother?"
To which Marie responded, with the gentle persistence peculiar to her,
"I leave them in Svadia. I go to America."
Though all the steerage people were kind to her, she fell into bad hands
by way of her tender sympathies. There were a man and woman with a
family of small children, who were coming to America carrying an
unsavory record. The woman fell ill, and Marie nursed her, and she
fastened herself upon Marie with brutal tenacity. She took away a little
silk shawl the child had inherited and was bringing over as a chief bit
of finery. She had a delicate appetite for steerage fare, and ate up the
precious cheese Marie's mother had given for a parting gift. And she
took charge of Marie's bit of money, never returning it.
"If she had but left me my cheese," says the Svenska maid, "I might have
had something to eat between New York and Illinois. I just had my ticket
in the cars, and, oh, it was more than two days, and I had such feelings
in my stomach! I was all alone and speak not a word of English, and
everybody around me eat, but I would not try to ask for somethings. A
German family by me have lots to eat, and when they left the cars I got
down under the seat and pick up orange-peel they throw down, and eat
that. I could not sleep in the night, I feel so bad. And when I get to
Illinois and to Willingham, the Swede people not meet me yet, and a
woman took me to her house to get my dinner, I never taste anything so
good in my life, but I eat with my hat on. The woman tried to take it
off, and I hold on with both hands. I thought she was going to take my
hat for pay, and I could not do without it."
The little maid fell sick among her kin, and a great doctor's bill of a
year and a half accumulated upon her. The cousin's husband paid it and
added the debt to her passage-money. By the time she was able to work,
her pretty pale face had attracted an old man, and this persistent
suitor tormented her until she was wellnigh helpless in the hands of her
relatives. They set her debt before her, and reminded her of the
obligation she was under to marry a rich man.
"But I said, 'I won't, I won't, I won't,'" says Marie. "That is all the
English I could talk, and I would say, 'I won't.' Then my cousin told me
I must leave; I could not stay in her house. And I felt dreadful bad.
The young folks come in with provisions to see me: they made a party
because I was going away. And I notice that all kept being called into
the next room but me. I was weak yet, and it made me feel as if they
wanted to slight me. But last of all they called me into the next room,
and there was twenty-five dollar they had made up to give me. And I
cried; I could not talk and thank them, but just cried hard as I could
cry. Then I took that money and paid part of my debt, and got a good
place to work."
Marie is strong, willing, humble, and touchingly friendly in the
position of the Western "girl." She is ambitious to learn American ways.
She makes the most delicious pancakes that ever fluffed upon a griddle
or united with butter and maple syrup. She is religious, she is tender
with children, she is full of love for her native land. Her lovers are
not encouraged.
"I go back to Sveden to visit it once more in five years. I go back
before I marry any man, now my debt is all paid."
This Svenska maid is full of folk-stories. She tells the children how
St. John's eve is celebrated in Sweden. The young men and girls bring
boughs and construct arbors. They stay up all night, eating, playing,
and visiting from arbor to arbor. About midsummer, it is true, there is
very little night in Northern Sweden.
"This was once in the papers," says Marie innocently. "They said it was
true. There was a girl going to take her first communion, and she got
into the churchyard before she missed her braid. Then she turned round
and started home after her braid, and met a man with a covered basket on
his arm. He asked her what she was going for, and she told him she was
going home for what she forgot, and the man said, 'Look in the basket,
and see if that is your switch.' She looked, and there was the hair
coiled up. Then he asked her if he might put it on her head, and the
girl said yes, and he put it on, and she went to church.
"It came to the place where the minister gives her the bread, and her
braid slipped down on one shoulder; but when he gave her the wine it
jump like it going to strike the cup, for it was a snake the man put on
her, and it was fast to her head and never came off again."
Marie's mother in youth worked for a Swedish farmer, and it was her duty
to get up about three o'clock in the morning and light a fire under the
boiler where the cows' feed was heated. This was in the barn. The cows
stood upon a floor over a large pit wherein were caught all the liquids
of the stable. The sleepy maid took a coal upon a chip, instead of
matches, and this primitive custom saved her from horribly drowning. For
as she opened the cows' stable one morning, and was taking a step
within, the chip flared up, and showed her three cows swimming below in
the pit. The floor had given way.
"Sometimes there are excursions across the ocean," says Marie, speaking
of that star of a home visit which lures her into the future, "and you
can go and come back for twenty-five dollars. They do not have nice
things to eat in the steerage, but you can keep alive." M.H.C.
* * * * *
The "Additional Hair" Supply.
The late war between France and China had one effect which the public
did not expect,--it created a panic among the French dealers in human
hair. Before that war began it was not generally known that a vast
proportion of the false hair used in Europe and America was imported
from China into France and there prepared for the trade. But the
beginning of hostilities between the two countries made the fact
apparent by the sudden cutting off of the customary supply from the
Celestial Empire. A German paper mentions that in 1883 the hair thus
imported amounted to one hundred and twenty-four thousand seven hundred
and fifteen kilograms, for which the French dealers paid at the rate of
only ten or twelve francs per kilogram. As no other country can, or at
any rate will, supply human hair in such enormous quantities and at such
a low price, the effect on the market may easily be imagined. The
hair-merchants of Marseilles had been accustomed to furnish at least
twenty-five thousand _coiffures_ for women and several thousand wigs for
men every year; and even before the stoppage of direct communication
with China they had found it hard to get as much raw material as they
needed. When their principal drawing-point became inaccessible they were
reduced to despair, and perhaps presented the only case ever known in
which "tearing the hair" would seem to have been attended with some
practical benefit. However, the termination of the war revived their
hopes, and they are now making up for the lost time with a vigor and
determination which even threaten the male Celestial with the loss of
his sacred pig-tail.
The European sources from which human hair is obtained are not numerous
or very prolific. Many peasant-women of Normandy and Bretagne sell their
beautiful brown, red, or golden locks, but these are of such fine
quality that they command very high prices. Norman or Breton girls
having braids eighty centimetres in length sell them for as much as a
thousand francs. Perfectly white hair from the same French provinces
brings a sum which seems almost fabulous. The French journal "Science
et Nature" declares that the price commonly paid for a braid of such
white hair weighing one kilogram is _twenty-five thousand francs_.
The hair-merchants of France have never been very successful in drawing
supplies for their business from England, Germany, or any of the
countries in the northern part of Europe. Lately, however, they have
begun to have a good deal of success among the lower classes of the
Italians. Their imports from Italy are already comparatively large, and
they seem to be increasing every year. Such an easy way of getting money
as this opportunity affords must appear vastly attractive to the swarms
of professional beggars who infest every highway, church door, and
public square in Southern Italy, and whose enjoyment of the
indispensable _dolce far niente_ cannot be spoiled by merely submitting
to the operation of having their hair cut off. It is probable that they
furnish much more of the hair brought from Italy than do the
laboring-classes of the cities or the honest _contadini_ of the rural
districts.
The idea of actually wearing hair which once belonged to some member of
"the unspeakable" _lazzaroni_ tribe cannot be considered a fascinating
one. At the same time it is at least not more unattractive than the
consciousness of having fallen heir to the capillary adornments of a
Cantonese tonka-boat girl. And in reality such a feeling, though natural
enough, would be based upon nothing but imagination. All the hair
purchased and used by the dealers in Paris, Marseilles, and other French
cities to which the Chinese and Italian hair is brought goes through a
number of preparatory processes, which cleanse and purify it thoroughly;
and when it is ready to be sold again it is probably in as
unobjectionable a state as hair can reach. As for the imagination, if we
were to allow it to govern us entirely in all such cases we should soon
find ourselves restricted to almost as few comforts and conveniences as
those unhappy historical characters whose constant fear of poison
reduced their whole diet to boiled eggs. Still, the feeling is one of
which it is very hard to rid ourselves; and in all probability the
ladies who derive the most unalloyed satisfaction from their
"additional" braids are those who have had them made from "combings" of
their own hair. J.A.C.
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