are kept, we will say, six of these are men, and two of those men out of livery.  The pay of these principal figures in the family, when at the highest rate, is fifteen pence English a day, out of which they find clothes and eating—­for fifteen pence includes board-wages; and most of these fellows are married too, and have four or five children each.  The dinners drest at home are, for this reason, more exactly contrived than in England to suit the number of guests, and there are always half a dozen; for dining alone or the master and mistress tete-a-tete as we do, is unknown to them, who make society very easy, and resolve to live much together.  No odd sensation then, something like shame, such as we feel when too many dishes are taken empty from table, touches them at all; the common courses are eleven, and eleven small plates, and it is their sport and pleasure, if possible, to clear all away.  A footman’s wages is a shilling a day, like our common labourers, and paid him, as they are paid, every Saturday night.  His livery, mean time, changed at least twice a year, makes him as rich a man as the butler and valet—­but when evening comes, it is the comicallest sight in the world to see them all go gravely home, and you may die in the night for want of help, though surrounded by showy attendants all day.  Till the hour of departure, however, it is expected that two or three of them at least sit in the antichamber, as it is called, to answer the bell, which, if we confess the truth, is no light service or hardship; for the stairs, high and wide as those of Windsor palace, all stone too, run up from the door immediately to that apartment, which is very large, and very cold, with bricks to set their feet on only, and a brazier filled with warm wood ashes, to keep their fingers from freezing, which in summer they employ with cards, and seem but little inclined to lay them down when ladies pass through to the receiving room.  The strange familiarity this class of people think proper to assume, half joining in the conversation, and crying oibo[Footnote:  Oh dear!], when the master affirms something they do not quite assent to, is apt to shock one at beginning, the more when one reflects upon the equally offensive humility they show on being first accepted into the family; when it is exposed that they receive the new master, or lady’s hand, in a half kneeling posture, and kiss it, as women under the rank of Countess do the Queen of England’s when presented at our court.—­This obsequiousness, however, vanishes completely upon acquaintance, and the footman, if not very seriously admonished indeed, yawns, spits, and displays what one of our travel-writers emphatically terms his flag of abomination behind the chair of a woman of quality, without the slightest sensation of its impropriety.  There is, however, a sort of odd farcical drollery mingled with this grossness, which tends greatly to disarm one’s wrath; and