From all one hears, those living in Buenos Aires and the larger towns
have a terrible time of it with their servants, especially if they are
not overburdened with the good things of this world in the shape of hard
cash; but my experiences have been confined to the camp, so that of the
town side of the question I cannot speak.
I have been three years in the province of Cordoba, and all the servants
I have met with except one were Argentines from the foothills of the
Cordoba Sierras.
They were without exception quite untrained as far as the English idea
goes, and the first thing to do with them was usually to teach them the
primitive ideas of cleanliness. The first servant I had was an ancient
female named Andrea, about forty years old, and it proved quite
impossible to get her to see the necessity of keeping anything in the
kitchen clean, as she seemed imbued with the idea that it was great
waste of time washing saucepans and frying-pans, as they would only get
dirty again when next used, and the most she could be persuaded to do
was to rub them round inside with a bit of old newspaper or a handful of
grass. Needless to say, after a time I got tired of these methods, and
so we parted.
My next servant, Angelina, was one of the best I had, as she was clean,
which was a great consideration, and also she was quick to learn and
soon picked up the rudiments of cooking according to our ideas; her
great failing, however, was that she was anything but honest, and could
not refrain from petty pilfering; and another drawback to her was her
objection to wearing shoes or stockings in the hot weather; in spite of
being constantly told that she must not appear without them, she would
insist in doing so, and this was a continual cause of trouble.
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