WOMEN. 429 



riages. They object even to the work of looking after and 

 superintending a house, and on that account prefer to live 

 in hotels. Those who are obliged to work for their living 

 do so as school teachers, as clerks in post offices, in tele- 

 graph offices, in shops, in any way in fact where physical 

 exertion can be dispensed with. The American woman has 

 perfectly regular though rather sharp features, and when 

 very young is undoubtedly very pretty, the bloom however 

 rapidly fades away, and she is an old woman at thirty. She 

 has only one or at most two children. The Canadian 

 woman is a marked contrast. She is in appearance quite 

 the Englishwoman generally a blonde. Canadian ladies 

 are fully as much addicted to out-door pursuits and amuse- 

 ments as are English ladies. Even in the depths of winter 

 they have their daily walks or their snow-shoeing, trabo- 

 gening, or skating parties. Thanks to this more healthy 

 mode of life, to their robust constitutions, and to their 

 healthy climate, they preserve their good looks to the 

 last. As to the poorer women in Canada they have no 

 Chinamen, negroes, or Irishwomen to work for them, and 

 so they are compelled to attend to their own households 

 and dairies, and this seems to agree well with them. 

 Unlike the Americans there seems to be no limit to their 

 families and no end to their good looks, and the middle- 

 aged Canadian women (if such an expression can be 

 applied to the fair sex) present as great a contrast to the 

 worn-out and faded American women of a similar unmen- 

 tionable age as can possibly be imagined. 



I cannot help thinking that those people who speculate 

 upon the absorption of the Dominion of Canada by the 

 republic must be quite ignorant of the characters and 



