Perhaps you may have travelled in Asia. If so, you cannot be ignorant how grossly indecorous to Asiatic ears it is, to enquire of a husband after his wife’s health; and probably you may know, that men have lost their lives to atone for such an impropriety. You know, too, of course, that in Eastern nations it is indecent for a woman to uncover her face; but perhaps you may not know, unless your travels have extended to Abyssinia, that there the indecency consists in uncovering the feet.[5] In Central Africa, you may have seen women bathing in public, without the slightest sense of impropriety; but you were doubtless told, that men could not be permitted a similar liberty; seeing that modesty requires they should perform their ablutions in private. If my reader has seen all or any of these countries and customs, I doubt not that he or she will read my little book understandingly, and interpret it in the purity which springs from enlarged and enlightened views; or, indeed, from common sense. If not—if you who now peruse these lines have been educated at home, and have never passed the boundary line of your own nation—perhaps of your own village—if you have not learnt that there are other proprieties besides those of your country; and that, after all, genuine modesty has its legitimate seat in the heart rather than in the outward form or sanctioned custom—then, I fear me, you may chance to cast these pages from you, as the major domo did the proffered stockings, unconscious that the indelicacy lies, not in my simple words, or the Spanish magistrates’ honest offering, but in the pruriently sensitive imagination that discovers impropriety in either. Yet, even though inexperienced, if you be still young and pure-minded, you may read this book through, and I shall fear from your lips, or in your hearts, no odious misconstruction. Young men and women! you who, if ignorant, are uncorrupted also; you in whose minds honest and simple words call up none but honest and simple ideas; you who think no evil; you who are still believers in human virtue and human happiness; you who, like our fabled first parents in their paradise, are yet unlearned alike in the hypocritical conventionalities and the odious vices of pseudo-civilization; you, with whom love is stronger than fear, and the law within the breast more powerful than that in the statue book; you whose feelings are still unblunted, and whose sympathies still warm and generous; you who belong to the better portion of your species, and who have formed your opinion of mankind from guileless spirits like your own—young men and women! it is to your pure feelings I would fain speak: it is by your unsophisticated hearts I would fain have my treatise and my motives judged.