“Oh, yes!” sez I (wormwood and gaul still saturating my axents); “it is very common—it is always practised. Sometimes the victims are only frightened to death and maimed and made idiots and invalids of; sometimes they don’t die so soon; but then, agin,” sez I, “they die fur quicker—sometimes, when the young gentlemen want to be extra funny, and use some deadly gas, their victim dies to once, right under their hands.”
“But don’t the Government interfere to punish such dreadful deeds?”
“Oh, no!” sez I; “the Government has its hands too full a-grantin’ licenses and sech, sellin’ the stuff that helps to make these disgraceful seens.”
“Well, do not men and women rise and punish such deeds themselves?”
“Oh, no!” sez I; “wimmen are considered too feeble-minded to pass any jedgment on sech doin’s—they’re considered by the college professors and presidents, as a general thing, as too weak-minded and volatile to take in a college education, and men are kep’ pretty busy a-bringin’ up arguments to keep wimmen in their place.
“Of course, no sech doin’s ever took place in a woman’s college. They generally spend their time in learnin’, and don’t riot round and act, and that itself is considered, I believe, an evidence that wimmen are inheriently weak and not really fitted for the higher education. It is, I believe, considered a damagin’ evidence agin her powers of mind to think she don’t have no hankerin’ to spend her college days a-gittin’ up the reputation of a prizefighter and a boat-swain, and had ruther spend her time a-bringin’ out the strength of her mind and soul instead of her muscles.”
Sez I, “Take that with her refusal to kill and maim and torture her fellow students by Hazin’, and her dislike to cigarettes, drinkin’, etc.—take ’em all together, though she carries off prizes right and left for learnin’ and good behavior, yet these weaknesses of hern in refusin’ to jine in such upliftin’ exercises, tells agin her dretfully in the eyes of the male world!”
Oh! how the wormword showed in my axent as I spoke.
“Of all the strange things which I have seen in your strange country,” sez Al Faizi, “this is one of the strangest—a civilized nation practising such barbarities!”
And he took out that little book with the cross on’t and writ for a quarter of an hour, and I d’no but more.