The Arkansaw traveler., 1888-03-17
SOME INTERESTING WOMEN
Albany Fair Journal.

every house has barred windows and fortress like doors, realized that the women were prisoners, though I dought whether they would have valued compassion, since, like cana ries, they have been in duress SO many generations as to have lost the stand point from which to judge between freedom and thralldom. Though visited towns that had scarcely known any change, except what earthquakes had brought them, since COrtez rested in them on his way to conquer Mexico, saw no sight so strange as that of the women lolling in the bench like stills of the great windows, dressed for public view, and looking lazily out of their great black orbs at whoever passed along the street. Those who were young were nearly all beautiful, but their elders had lost their good looks in a superabundance ot flesh. They could not go out of doors in the daytime except in their carriages and accompanied by parent or guardian. And when they went shopping the clerks attended them in their car riages, the ladies sending for what they wanted to look at and the clerks staggering out under great burdens of goods. You can imagine that shop ping there is neither a passion nor a vice, as it is said to be in Paris. Isn't it in Paris that the women are so fond of it? So, after the morning was spent in housework and yelled visit to the church, the Cuban ladies dressed to Toll at the windows, and their sweethearts crept along close to the walls and chatted with them, if no old woman was by to prevent them, and if they had proceeded so far in their love- making as to be able to converse with their hearts delights. Before they could do that they had to walk along the streets ever SO many times, past their sweethearts' win dCws, to be noticed and flirted with, and then came long period of ogling and the exchanging of swift glances and peeping behind fans and waving of handkerchiefs-all ex- tremely silly in the eyes of American girls.
 One day I was making my way through dismal piece of woodland in Canada, on the outskirts of Mon- treal. B-r-r-r! How cold it was, and how the snow lay piled up ali over the country! Suddenly 1 heard merry voices and the cracking of twigs and rustling of brush. Just as suddenly the figure of young man in the uniform of the Tuque Bleu Suow-shoe club appeared, ascending a knoll. Three girls were at his heels, followed by other young men and women. There was new view of the possibilities of womanh pod. Our Yankee girls, best of all in the best of the sexes, have liberty enough, but how few use it to place themselves side by side with the men in their athletic sports! How ruddy and bright-eyed and wholesome were these Canadian maidens! How su- perbly they were framed, and how overfowing with animal spirits they werei Afterward I saw them skat- ing for hours and covering miles of ice hand in hand with their brothers (and the brothers of other folks), and at tobogganing, driving, and all the other sports that interested them, they were almost, if not quite, the equals of the men. When it comes to dancing, as was informed, the merry ones among them took a. delight in lifting the young gentlemen from the states off their feet, once in a while, and swinging around with them, as a New York girl might do with child if it was small enough.
 Far over on the Pacific coast of the same country, and on Vancouver Island, I found another race of women -squaws of some tribes allied to the Eskimos. They were so ignorant and homely, and belonged to such rude order of civilization, that I could scarcely expect to interest any young lady readers in them. But they pos- sessed an interest for the married ladies, and might even arouse envy in the breasts of some fair matrons, for their customs allow each wife to have Gan assistant husband" Better yet. the husbands do not select their own assistants; this is left to the fair ladies themselves. The assistant husbands have to do what the New England folks call "chores" for the women get kindling wood, run on errands and make themselves useful in all menial ways. Their only reward and rec ompense is that if the real husband dies in any case, or disappears, or QO0a away fnr anv unconusI nro h1o length of time, they marry the woman for whom they have been working.
 On the plains, in Assinibola, I found little lady in the larger of the only two stores in the place, who told mo that the Indians on . reservation close by had begun to grow restless, and were manil1sting the fact by unusual