AN ADAPTATION.

BY ORPHEUS C. KERR.

CHAPTER XXI.

BENTHAM TO THE RESCUE.

European travellers in this country--especially if one economical
condition of their coming hither has not been the composition of works
of imagination on America, sufficiently contemptuous to pay all the
expenses of the trip--have, occasionally--and particularly if they have
been invited to write for New York magazines, take professorships in
native colleges, or lecture on the encouraging Continental progress of
scientific atheism before Boston audiences;--such travellers, we say,
convinced that they shall lose no money by it, but, on the contrary,
rather sanguine of making a little thereby in the long run, have
occasionally remarked, that, in the United States, women journeying
alone are treated with a chivalric courtesy and deference not so
habitually practiced in any other second-class new nation on the face of
the earth.[1]

What, oh, what can be more true than this? A lady well stricken in
years, and of adequate protraction of nose and rectilinear undeviation
of figure, can travel alone from Maine to Florida with as perfect
immunity from offensive masculine intrusion as though she were guarded
by a regiment; while a somewhat younger girl, with curls and an innocent
look, can not appear unaccompanied by an escort in an American omnibus,
car, ferry-boat, or hotel, without appealing at once to the finest