Counting up to the 13th of August we only had an average of twenty-three paying people in the house including the owner and his family. Mrs. Tingee and her two or three girls, and a boy in the yard could take care of that numbe-easily; but it has to be according to style. There is the Summerland House at Uni-tah running half the time with but seventy-five paying people and eighty-five "help." At this house we are between styles and have nine employes to the average twenty-three guests. and sometimes have ten. There is a fraction of a person somewhere, perhaps that is the baby, but we will not let fractions trouble us when they are but small, so of the four thousand meals consumed eleven hundred and thirty-four have gone to the help and the twenty-three guests have to pay for them as well as the two thousand eight hundred and ninety-eight meals for themselves, all at ten cents a meal, discarding the ninth of a cent fraction as usual for the sake of lucidity. Besides this comes the wages paid for carrying on the work of the place to swell the expense account to nearly donble. As most people are sensitive on the subject of the amount of compensation they can command, I will not "give away" anybody but will give the sum total for the bunch of us. There was one whom I have reason to suppose took his light employment as the price of his board during his Summer vacation, and cost the house nothing in cash; another, perhaps, had his compensation contingent upon the amount of the profits; two of the workers were hired by the year at country wages, and the girls who did the table waiting were at the usual house-girl prices. The cook for this short season received as much pay as the chief cook at the best of the two hotels at the depot and a little more than the chief cook at Black's, which was a fancy price for this small house to pay, yet neither of those chief cooks would have taken the situation or done the work because it is mixed, both meat and pastry, and because it is mixed other ways; for there are some things which look natural enough but which it is impossible for a limited and graded, bound and restricted, enthralled and restrained cook to do. I don't know why the French cooks simply say it is impos-seeble for them to do so and that is all there is of it - as, for instance, it is quite possible for fishes to fly, I have seen them do it in the tropics, but it is impossible for the chief cook of a full-grown hotel to clean fish, and equally impossible for his second cook to pass dirty dishes over to the next table, however much they may be in his way on his own table, - it isn't his business to gather up dishes.

These impossibilities often cause embarrassment in small houses where perhaps there is not yard-man enough to go droun, or where, it may be, there is no yard man but the proprietor or his clerk, and as they will not clean the fish for the cook and the cook cannot cook it without being cleaned of course there is nothing for that cook and his second to do and they step out. The small houses then hunt up a woman cook, for they are generally more pliable; they either do not know of those iron-clad rules of the kitchen, or, knowing them, with the natural mulishness of woman they choose to do the other way and go right on earning the wages. There are said to be a few first-class female cooks getting as high wages as the same grade of male cooks. Without the least intention of saying what ought to be and only stating facts the highest wages I have ever known a woman to receive for cooking in a small hotel both meat and pastry, was fifty dollars a month. There are thousand of them working in hotels and boarding-houses at five dollars a week, whose work is but little above common labor. There is no doubt but there is a demand for skillful, bill-of-fare, women cooks; such can always secure good situations with sufficient help at about ten dollars a week in any part of this country, board and lodging, of course, in addition. It is on that figure I will base future estimates of the cost of board in country houses. In the present instance, however, I have the actualities to draw from and find that the sum total of wages paid for the six weeks was three hundred and twelve dollars.