"It is true," said she, "that I have not been actually molested or insulted, and I believe, after all, that in our orderly city there is little real danger to be apprehended by females of respectable appearance, when reduced to the sad necessity of walking alone in the evening. But still the mere supposition, the bare possibility of being thus exposed to the rudeness of the vulgar and unfeeling, will for ever prevent me from again subjecting myself to so intolerable a situation. I know not what could induce me again to go through all I have suffered since I left Mrs. Tanfield's door.—And this will be my last attempt at sociable visiting."
We submit it to the opinion of our fair readers, whether, in nine cases out of ten, the visits of ladies do not "go off the better," if anticipated by some previous intimation. We believe that our position will be borne out by the experience both of the visiters and the visited. Our heroine, as we have seen, did not only, on most of these occasions, subject herself to much disappointment and annoyance, but she was likewise the cause of considerable inconvenience to her entertainers; and we can say with truth, that the little incidents we have selected "to point our moral and adorn our tale," are all sketched from life and reality.
COUNTRY LODGINGS.
"Chacun a son gout."—French Proverb.
It has often been a subject of surprise to me, that so many even of those highly-gifted people who are fortunate enough to possess both sorts of sense (common and uncommon), show, nevertheless, on some occasions, a strange disinclination to be guided by the self-evident truth, that in all cases where the evil preponderates over the good, it is better to reject the whole than to endure a large portion of certain evil for the sake of a little sprinkling of probable good. I can think of nothing, just now, that will more aptly illustrate my position, than the practice so prevalent in the summer-months of quitting a commodious and comfortable home, in this most beautiful and convenient of cities, for the purpose of what is called boarding out of town; and wilfully encountering an assemblage of almost all "the ills that flesh is heir to," in the vain hope of finding superior coolness in those establishments that go under the denomination of country lodgings, and are sometimes to be met with in insulated locations, but generally in the unpaved and dusty streets of the villages and hamlets that are scattered about the vicinity of Philadelphia.
These places are adopted as substitutes for the springs or the sea-shore; and it is also not unusual for persons who have already accomplished the fashionable tour, to think it expedient to board out of town for the remainder of the summer, or till they are frightened home by the autumnal epidemics.
I have more than once been prevailed on to try this experiment, in the universal search after coolness which occupies so much of the attention of my fellow-citizens from June to September, and the result has been uniformly the same: a conviction that a mere residence beyond the limits of the city is not an infallible remedy for all the désagrémens of summer; that (to say nothing of other discomforts) it is possible to feel the heat more in a small house out of the town than in a large one in it.
The last time I was induced to make a trial of the delights of country lodgings, I had been told of a very genteel lady (the widow of an Englishman, said to have been highly connected in his own country), who had taken a charming house at a short distance from the city, with the intention of accommodating boarders for the summer; and I finally allowed myself to be prevailed on to become an inmate of her establishment, as I had just returned from the north, and found the weather still very warm.