Punchinello, Volume 2, No. 28, October 8, 1870

Excerpt

THE MYSTERY OF MR. E. DROOD.

AN ADAPTATION.

BY ORPHEUS C. KERR.

CHAPTER XXI.

BENTHAM TO THE RESCUE.

European travellers in this country—especially if one economical condition of their coming hither has not been the composition of works of imagination on America, sufficiently contemptuous to pay all the expenses of the trip—have, occasionally—and particularly if they have been invited to write for New York magazines, take professorships in native colleges, or lecture on the encouraging Continental progress of scientific atheism before Boston audiences;—such travellers, we say, convinced that they shall lose no money by it, but, on the contrary, rather sanguine of making a little thereby in the long run, have occasionally remarked, that, in the United States, women journeying alone are treated with a chivalric courtesy and deference not so habitually practiced in any other second-class new nation on the face of the earth.

What, oh, what can be more true than this? A lady well stricken in years, and of adequate protraction of nose and rectilinear undeviation of figure, can travel alone from Maine to Florida with as perfect immunity from offensive masculine intrusion as though she were guarded by a regiment; while a somewhat younger girl, with curls and an innocent look, can not appear unaccompanied by an escort in an American omnibus, car, ferry-boat, or hotel, without appealing at once to the finest fatherly feelings of every manly middle-aged observer whose wife is not watching him, and exciting as general a desire to make her trip socially delightful as though each gentlemanly eye seeking hers were indeed that of a tender sire.

Thus, although Miss POTTS'S lonely stay in her hotel had been so brief, the mysterious American instinct of chivalry had discovered it very early on the first morning after her arrival, and she arose from her delicious sleep to find at least half a dozen written offers of hospitality from generous strangers, sticking under her door. Understanding that she was sojourning without natural protectors in a strange city, the thoughtful writers, who appeared to be chiefly Western men of implied immense fortunes, begged her (by the delicate name of "Fair Unknown") to take comfort in the thought that they were stopping at the same hotel and would protect her from all harm with their lives. In proof of this unselfish disposition on their parts, several of them were respectively ready to take her to a circus-matinee, or to drive in Central Park, on that very day: and her prompt acceptance of these signal evidences of a disinterested friendship for womanhood without a natural protector could not be more simply indicated to those who now freely offered such friendship, than by her dropping her fork twice at the public breakfast table, or sending the waiter back three times with the boiled eggs to have them cooked rightly.

FLORA had completed her chemical toilet, put all the bottles, jars, and small round boxes back into her satchel again, and sat down to a second reading of these gratifying intimations that a prepossessing female orphan is not necessarily without assiduous paternal guardianship at her command wherever there are Western fathers, when Mr....