is to good situations in families as servants, service being beneath
their dignity and tending to disturb the balance of equality. I doubt if
a native-born woman would permit herself to be called a servant; indeed,
all the servants are Irish, Swedes, Norwegians, French, German, or
negroes; the American girls fill the factories and the sweat-shops of
the great cities. When I refer these girls to the lower classes it is
merely to classify them, as morally and intellectually they are
sometimes the equal of the higher classes. The middle-class women or
girls are an attractive type, well educated and often beautiful. You
obtain an idea of them in the great shops and bazaars of the great
cities, where they fill every conceivable position and receive from five
to six dollars per week.

But it is with the higher classes that you will be most interested, and
when I say that the American girl, the product of the first families,
is at once beautiful, refined, cultured, charming physically and
mentally, I have but faintly expressed it; yet the most pronounced
characteristic is their "daring," or temerity. There is no word exactly
to cover it. I frequently met women at dinners. With few exceptions, it
appears impossible for the American girl to take one of our race, an
Oriental, seriously. She can not conceive that he may be a man of
intelligence and education, and I can not better describe her than to
sketch in its detail a dinner to which I was invited by the ---- at
Washington. The invitation was engraved on a small card and read "The
---- and Mrs. ---- request the honor of the presence of the ---- at
dinner on Wednesday at eight o'clock, etc." I immediately sent my valet
with an acceptance and a basket of orchids to the hostess, this being
the mode among the men who are _au fait_.

A week later I went to the dinner, and was taken up to the dressing-room
for men, where I found a dozen or more, all in the conventional evening
dress I have described--now with tails, it being a ladies' affair. In a
corner was a table, and by it stood a negro, also in a dress suit,
identical with that of the others. I was cordially greeted by a guest,
who said, "Let me introduce you to our American minister to Ijiji and
Zanzibar," and he presented me to the tall negro, who was turning out
some bottled "cocktail." I shook hands with him, and he laughed, showing
a set of teeth like an elephant's tusks, and asked me "what I would
have." He was a servan