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, yet her skin is always skin; but often when a man's face has been sheltered from storm and shine, his skin is hide. His mane is not generally so long and flowing as a horse's, but there it is. Once, in a car, a man in front of me put his arm on the back of his seat and fell asleep. Presently his hand dropped over, and I looked at it,--a mass of broad, brawny vitality, great pipes of veins, great crescents of nails, great furrows at the joints, and you might cut a fine sirloin of beef off the ball of the thumb; and this is a hand! _I_ call it an ox. A woman's hand, by hard labor, spreads and cracks, and sprouts bunches at the joints, and becomes tuberous at the ends of the fingers, but you can