has been a wife; they have discovered, perhaps, that cause and effect
may be convertible terms; that in such a serious matter, none but a fool
would buy a pig in the poke, and that, after all, maternity may lead to
marriage there, as marriage leads to maternity here. And why not? for
after the establishment of the lying-in hospitals of Russia, the
unmarried who bore _children to the state_ were proud of the duty, and
were looked upon, we are told, with great favor by the public. She
added, also, that she was once at a party made up of sixteen or eighteen
females, and females of good characters, all but one or two of whom were
mothers, or had been so, before they were married. By Chastelleux and
his English translator it would appear to have been very much the same
in America about the years 1780-1-2. It is not so now. To have had a
child before marriage would now be fatal to a woman here, whatever might
be her condition or beauty; fatal in every shape. No man would have
courage to marry her; no woman of character would associate with her.
Ask the first individual you meet, above the age of twelve or thirteen
here, and you may have the name and history of every poor girl in the
neighborhood who has been so unlucky as to have a child of her own
without leave, perhaps, within a period of six or eight years in a
populous neighborhood of twenty or thirty miles about. A widow with half
a score of children, forty years ago, if we may believe Dr. Franklin,
was an object for the fortune hunters of America. It is not so now. The
demand for widows, and for every sort of ready made family is beginning
to be over.

That which is called bundling here, though bad enough, is not a
twentieth part so bad. Here it is only a mode of courtship. The parties
instead of sitting up together, go to bed together; but go to bed with
their clothes on. This would appear to be a perilous fashion; but I have
been assured by the individual above, that he had proof to the contrary;