Jane Is Unwilling to Work

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Poor Jane is happy at home, doing just as she pleases and following her own sweet will, when a letter comes to her father announcing that there is an opening for her as domestic in a family nearby. The father, only too glad that the family's meagre income can now be augmented, hurries his daughter off to get her hat, while he gets ready himself to accompany her to her new employer's. The girl starts out with very bad grace, but on arriving at the home of her new mistress the father speaks in his daughter's behalf, with the result that the lady of the house tells Jane to take off her hat and start in. After giving the new maid instructions, the mistress goes out to do the marketing, leaving the girl alone in the house: the latter, angry to find that she now has to work whether she wills it or not, catches sight of the lady's pet parrot, which she immediately begins to tease and torment until the infuriated bird takes a nip out of her finger. The girl, only too glad of an excuse to find fault with the place, goes screaming to her mistress, who just then returns from her errand. The woman, seeing the poor bird stretched on the floor almost senseless from the girl's harsh treatment, chases the new maid out of the place, calling to her never to come back. As she rushes down the street she meets her father, but he has no sympathy for the wounded finger, but hurries her off to a milliner and tries to get her a job there, which he succeeds in doing, but here, too, misfortune awaits her, for hardly has she made a dozen stitches in a "Paris creation" before she pricks her finger and arouses the whole establishment with her cries of pain. The milliner, disgusted, takes the work out of her hands and tells her to get her hat and leave. Her next position is in a café, to which place she is literally dragged by her worn-out parent. Here she loads down the first beggar that comes in with all sorts of expensive dainties and after breaking several dollars' worth of crockery the proprietor hustles her off the premises. The father, not to be daunted by all these mishaps, puts her to work in a laundry and the "rough house" she causes there cannot be expressed in mere words, one must see the picture showing the head laundress (who is rather inclined to embonpoint) being pitched headlong into a tub of suds, to appreciate the situation.