It was once my fortune to show over Westminster Abbey an American woman whose name, by reason of her works--sound practical common-sense works,--has come to be known throughout the United States, and I heard "the wings of the dead centuries beat about her ears." I took her to Poet's Corner. She turned herself slowly about and looked at the names carved on either side of her, and then looked down and saw the names that lay graven beneath her feet; and she dropped sobbing on her knees upon the pavement. Johnson was not kind to the American colonies in his life. Those tears which fell upon his name, where it is cut into the slab of paving, were part of America's revenge. We all remember Kipling's "type-writer girl" in San Francisco,--"the young lady who in England would be a Person,"--who suddenly quoted at him Theophile Gautier. It is an incident which many Englishmen have read with incredulity, but which has nothing curious in it to the American mind. A stenographer in my own offices subsequently, I have heard, married a rich owner of race-horses and her dinners I understand are delightful. She was an excellent stenographer. In all frontier communities, where women are few and the primitive instincts have freer play than in more artificial societies, there blossoms a certain rough and ready chivalrousness which sets respect of womanhood above all laws and makes every man a self-constituted champion of the sex. This may be seen in a thousand communities scattered over the farther West; but it is no outgrowth of the American character, for it flourishes in all new societies in all parts of the world, no matter to what nationality the men of those societies belong. In a certain mining camp, late at night, a man--a man of some means, the son of a banker in a neighbouring town--was walking with a woman. Neither was sober and the woman fell to the ground. The man kicked her and told her to get up. As she did not comply he cursed her and kicked her again. Then chanced to come along one Ferguson, a gambler and a notoriously "bad man," who bade the other stop abusing the woman, whereupon he was promptly told to go to ---- and mind his own business. Ferguson replied that if the other touched the woman again he would shoot him. It was at this point that the altercation brought me out of my cabin, for the thing was happening almost where my doorstep (had I had a doorstep) ought to have been. The banker's son paid no heed to the warning, and once more proceeded to kick the woman. Thereupon Ferguson shot him. And, with the weapon which Ferguson carried and his ability as a marksman, when he shot, it might be safely regarded as final.