ct a
drum-beat;--one, incision; two, mastication; three, deglutition;--but
what tyranny does one not expect to find under monarchical
institutions? Put that into your next volume, intelligent British
tourist.

Down the St. Lawrence with millionaires, and artists, and gay young
girls, and sallow-faced invalids, and weary clergymen and men of
business who do not know what to do with their unwonted leisure and
find pleasuring a most unmitigated bore, and mothers with sick
children, dear little unnatural pale faces and heavy eyes,--may your
angels bring you health, tiny ones!--and, most interesting of all to
me, a party of priests and nuns on their travels. They sit near me,
and I can see them without turning my head, and hear them without
marked listening. The priests are sleekheaded men, and such as sleep
o' nights, ruddy, rotund, robust, with black hair and white bands,
well-dressed, well-fed, well-to-do, jolly, gentlemanly, clique-y,
sensible, shrewd, au fait. The nuns--now I am vexed to look at them.
Are nuns expected to be any more dead to the world than priests? Then
I should like to know why they must make such frights of themselves,
while priests go about like Christians? Why shall a nun walk black,
and gaunt, and lank, with a white towel wrapped around her face, all
possible beauty and almost all attractiveness despoiled by her
hideously unbecoming dress, while priests wear their hair and their
hats and their coats and their collars like any other gentleman? Why
are the women to be set up as targets, while the men may pass unnoticed
and unknown? If the woman's head must be shorn and shaven, why not the
man's? It is not fair. I can think of no reason, pretext, or excuse,
unless it is to be found in the fact that women are more beautiful than
men, and need greater disfigurement to make them ugly. That is a fact
which I have long suspected, and observations made on this journey
confirm my suspicions,--intensify them into certainty. An ugly woman
is handsomer than a handsome man,--if you examine them closely. She is
finer-grained, more soft, more delicate. Men are animals more than
women. I do not now mean the generic sense in which we are all
animals, but specifically and superficially. Men look more like horses
and cows. See our brave soldiers returning from the wars--Heaven's
blessing rest upon them!--grand, but are they not gruff? A woman's
face may be browned, roughened, and reddened by exposure