Boston and other places I find there is actually an organised
opposition on the part of the ladies themselves to the extension of
the franchise to women. I have hailed with delight the democratic
spirit displayed in the greeting of my friend and myself by the porter
of a hotel as "You fellows," and then had the cup of pleasure dashed
from my lips by being told by the same porter that "the other
_gentleman_ would attend to my baggage!" I have been parboiled with
salamanders who seemed to find no inconvenience in a room-temperature
of eighty degrees, and have been nigh frozen to death in open-air
drives in which the same individuals seemed perfectly comfortable. Men
appear at the theatre in orthodox evening dress, while the tall and
exasperating hats of the ladies who accompany them would seem to
indicate a theory of street toilette. From New York to Buffalo I am
whisked through the air at the rate of fifty or sixty miles an hour;
in California I travelled on a train on which the engineer shot
rabbits from the locomotive, and the fireman picked them up in time to
jump on the baggage-car at the rear end of the train. At Santa Barbara
I visited an old mission church and convent which vied in quaint
picturesqueness with anything in Europe; but, alas! the old monk who
showed us round, though wearing the regulation gown and knotted cord,
had replaced his sandals by elastic-sided boots and covered his
tonsure with a common chummy.[4]

Few things in the United States are more pleasing than the widespread
habits of kindness to animals (most American whips are, as far as
punishment to the horse is concerned, a mere farce). Yet no American
seems to have any scruple about adding an extra hundred weight or two
to an already villainously overloaded horse-car; and I have seen a
score of American ladies sit serenely watching the frantic straining
of two poor animals to get a derailed car on to the track again, when