-educated damsels. As to the
gentlemen, each of them tranquilly smoked his pipe and seemed lost in
contemplation of the blue and white tiles with which the fireplaces were
decorated, whereon sundry passages of Scripture were piously portrayed:
Tobit and his dog figured to great advantage; Haman swung conspicuously
on his gibbet; and Jonah appeared most manfully bouncing out of the
whale, like Harlequin through a barrel of fire.

The parties broke up without noise and without confusion. They were
carried home by their own carriages--that is to say, by the vehicles
Nature had provided them--excepting such of the wealthy as could afford
to keep a wagon. The gentlemen gallantly attended their fair ones to
their respective abodes, and took leave of them with a hearty smack at
the door, which as it was an established piece of etiquette, done in
perfect simplicity and honesty of heart, occasioned no scandal at that
time, nor should it at the present: if our greatgrandfathers approved of
the custom, it would argue a great want of reverence in their
descendants to say a word against it.

In this dulcet period of my history, when the beauteous island of
Manna-hata presented a scene the very counterpart of those glowing
pictures drawn of the golden reign of Saturn, there was, as I have
before observed, a happy ignorance, an honest simplicity, prevalent
among its inhabitants, which, were I even able to depict, would be but
little understood by the degenerate age for which I am doomed to write.
Even the female sex, those arch innovators upon the tranquillity, the
honesty, and gray-beard customs of society, seemed for a while to
conduct themselves with incredible sobriety and comeliness.

Their hair, untortured by the abominations of art, was scrupulously
pomatumed back from their foreheads with a candle, and covered with a
little cap of quilted calico which fitted exactly to their heads. Their
petticoats of linsey-woolsey were striped with a variety of gorgeous
dyes, though I must confess these gallant garments were rather short,
scarce reaching below the knee; but then they made up in the number,
which generally equalled that of the gentlemen's small-clothes; and,
what is still more praiseworthy, they were all of their own manufacture,
of which circumstance, as may well be supposed, they were not a little
vain.

These were the honest days in which every woman stayed at home, read the
Bible, and wore pockets--ay, and that too of