no subject for scandal or for maiden blushes, because I am an intense
philosopher, and Miss H. would be hard upon four hundred and fifty years
old--she would admit the following comment upon her evidence to be right. A
Frenchman, about thirty years ago, M. Simond, in his _Travels_, mentioned
incidentally the following hideous scene as one steadily observed and
watched by himself in France at a period some trifle before the French
Revolution:--A peasant was ploughing; and the team that drew his plough was
a donkey and a woman. Both were regularly harnessed: both pulled alike.
This is bad enough: but the Frenchman adds, that, in distributing his
lashes, the peasant was obviously desirous of being impartial: or, if
either of the yoke-fellows had a right to complain, certainly it was not
the donkey. Now, in any country, where such degradation of females could be
tolerated by the state of manners, a woman of delicacy would shrink from
acknowledging, either for herself or her friend, that she had ever been
addicted to any mode of labor not strictly domestic; because, if once
owning herself a prædial servant, she would be sensible that this
confession extended by probability in the hearer's thoughts to having
incurred indignities of this horrible kind. Haumette clearly thinks it more
dignified for Joanna to have been darning the stockings of her horny-hoofed
father, Monsieur D'Arc, than keeping sheep, lest she might then be
suspected of having ever done something worse. But, luckily, there was no
danger of _that_: Joanna never was in service; and my opinion is that her
father should have mended his own stockings, since probably he was the
party to make the holes in them, as many a better man than D'Arc does;
meaning by _that_ not myself, because, though certainly a better man than
D'Arc, I protest against doing anything of the kind. If I lived even with
Friday in Juan Fernandez, either Friday must do all the darning, or else it
must go undone. The better men that I meant were the sailors in the British
navy, every man of whom mends his own stockings. Who else is to do it?
Do you suppose, reader, that the junior lords of the admiralty are under