WANDERING WOMEN.

Otago Witness, Issue 1583, 25 March 1882, Page 27

WANDERING WOMEN.

The woman who goes on her travels is, like the special correspondent and the personal conductor, a curious outcome of railways and steamboats, and an itch for notoriety. Until the continent got opened up to a cheaper and easier mode of conveyance than the diligence 'and the private carriage, only very hardy or very rich people dreamed of making the grand tour. My lord, as a part of his education, did it. He took snuff in Paris, and put a mortgage on his lands at Naples. In Rome he was supposed to quote Latin, and in Vienna to be monstrous wicked : while the regulation thing was to experiment with all the vices he had imbibed, and the manners he had taken on during a few weeks' sojourn at the Hague, which was in those daj^s the jumping-pff place for the English fine gentlemen returning from his travels. But while the young squire and the man of quality were thus permitted to see Europe (and let Europe see them to), their sisters had no aspirations beyond Bath or Tunbridge Wells. To have visited Paris was accorded to a few ladies a century ago, while they would, at this moment, more quickly think of going to Lake Tanganyiki than to New York then. A travelled woman was indeed a suspicious character. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was not a nice person, but Pope s' dirty lines affected her character less than the fact of her having lived mysteriously in foreign parts. Lady Hester Stanhope, at a later date, was always spoken of by the county dames with a horror which her Libanite propensities could not justify ; and scores of good people, who knew little of her peccadilloes, but much of her ways of life in Damascus, were only a. trifle less generous to the unhappy woman, who, died, six months ago in the city where «-he was known as Lady Ellenborough. The stay-at-home Briton regarded the vagabond of either sex" with suspicion. Even when a venerable lady, still living— now the mother of the Duke of Westminster, but in 1827 the young bride of Lord Belgrave— took a tour with her husband into Northern Europe, the world seems to have been still very young and wild. The heavy travelling carriage lurched and creaked along roads untraversed save by the country waggon. Hotelkeepers still stood on their steps to welcome milor and niiladi ; and at uncertain intervals peasants were impressed to drag the white elephant out of the sandy rut of Holstein and Jutland. All this happened > less than sixty years ago— about the same time that Amelia Osborne and Jos. Sedley were* journeying across the Low Countries, and Becky Sharp and the Bruschen of Schoppenhausen were trundling in the Eilwagen to the fair of Pumpernickel. Nowadays it is .hard to find a middle-class woman who has not ranged over half of Europe, and, it may be, part of the new world also. Indeed, to nave gone on the tour which makes Switzerland and Paris, for three months in the year, distant suburbs of London, is not accounted travelling. The restless woman dreams 6f greater things. In Cairo, in 1 Luxor, in the crooked lines 'of Tangiers, in Denver, Yokohama, Tahiti, and Ballarat, you find her very' much at horne — full of confidence, yet evidently intent on no other business except what is known as 'globe-trotting.'' Were she a consul's wH[e, or a female missionary, a person with scientific views, or absorbed in exploding some 'social wrong, one could understand 'her roving propensities. Actresses and opera singers also wander far afield. In San Francisco and Delhi, Buenos Ayres and the city of 'lncas, Mexico, and Bogota, they appear and disappear, leaving a long trail of signs and monster wall placards behind them. But the travelling women of the nineteenth century neither sing nor play. They have no fad, and are frequently irreverent. Ida Pfeiffer, who led the van of these female roamers, was scientific, elderly, and terribly in earnest. They set out to be amused, to see something that their sisterß and cousins have not seen, and to escape from themselves and their prosaic surroundings. The trayelling woman is not often young, but she is seldom very old. Lady Franklin was well up in years when she and Miss' Craeroft began their course of ever wandering with a hungry heart ;• but poor Miss Tinne'j' who organised the African expedition' in which she fell, was both rich and faiiv As may be expected, the modern travelling woman is usually single : for there, are not many spouses who will ' submit to be dragged across the globe "to gratify the curiosity or the vanity of their helpmates. However, she is now and then married. Sometimes, like Lady Brassey or Mrs Gill, she goes with # her husband and ' writes the book ; at other times her husband goes with her. But the result is the same. Lady Brassey's eternal prattle about ' Tom ' and Tom's wonderful ways, Mrs Gill's bridal pride in ' David's ' astronomy on Ascension Isle, or Mrs Scott-Stevenson's employment of ' Andrew ' as a foil for her smartness, are quite as tiresome as Lady Florence Dixie's calm negation of the gentleman from whom she takes her name, or Lady Winifred Blunts assumption that the poet who could write the Love Songs of Proteus must be regarded as a kind of martial lay-figure. Lady Baker goes farther afield than any of them, but she has not rushed into print ; and now that Miss Bird, the most capable of all the travelling women, has evolved herself into Mrs Bishop,'it is presumed that, as behoves a doptor's wife, she has hung up her masculine ridingdress as a trophy of the past. Cvi bono ? Strictly speaking, these wandering women have not travelled to instruct anybody, and have been most successful in their mission. They amuse, but they rarely inform. The female mind, either naturally or owing to its early training, is admirably fitted for the reception of impressions, but it cannot generalise. To put two and two together and deduce three for our benefit is not its forte. Neither is it laborious or accurate. The record of a woman's travels is always entertaining ; she sees things different from men. Everything is new to her, and naturally she considers them new to her readers also. We must of course listen to a prodigious amount of talk about nothing— about how Mabel and Muriel behaved here, or how the maids went ashore there ; whether the ' dear governor ' was ' more than kind ;' or how tho yacht came triumphantly out of a ' fearful storm,' which is the female way of describing a stiffish breeze. But for tho time being it is interesting though it leaves little behind. The travelling woman is, of course, terribly inaccurate : it is the way of her sex. You really cannot expect a ' poor woman ' to know all about the height of mountains, or whether the pillars of a mosque were of plaster or stone, or even to retail a story to somebody's discredit in decently scandalous detail. The ' poor woman ' is the excuso for many shortcomings, just an 'unprotected females' were, ' until recently, the cant term for these lady land-roamors. Tn truth, they aro protected infinitely more than men. Their very weakness is their strength. What we most fight for they get for tho .asking ; what men have to pay for women are presented with. A hotel must be crowded if a room is not found for 'the lady ;' and though at table the experienced but mercenary waiter knows that it is profitless to dance attendance on the travelling dame, the male guests, who have nothing at

stake in the game, keep him to his duty. In railway-carriages and in post-waggons they have the best, the last, or the only place. The gentlest horse is 'the lady's,' and the roughest guide is civil to her, knowing that a hundred revolvers are ready to avenge an insult to the dowdiest person who ever wore a petticoat. In reality, she travels more cheaply and far more smoothly than any man. A thousand troubles and worries and expenses which dog him are saved her ; and if she were only a little more amiable than she wontedly is, the • unprotected female ' could traverse the globe with a comfort unknown to her less fortunate brother. It takes all kinds of people to paint a picture of any country, and the wandering woman is not without her uses as one of them. Old Samuel Hearne, more than a century ago, insisted that women in a traveller's tram were all essential : for they were such gossips, and so artful and inquisitive, that they pick up lots of things that would otherwise have escaped. And' then, writes the enthusiastic explorer of the Copper Mine River, ' they can live by licking their fingers,'— which experience of Mi Hearne's we cannot confirm. — World.