question often asked, "Can women travel alone through Europe?" Recalling
our own experience,--too brief to serve as a criterion,--I should still
say, "_Yes_." We met, frequently, parties of ladies who had made the
whole grand tour alone. In Switzerland we found English women,
constantly, without escort. The care of choosing routes, of looking
after baggage and buying tickets, of managing the sometimes complicated
affairs attendant upon sight-seeing, with the vexations and impositions
met with and suffered on every hand, no woman would voluntarily accept
without great compensation, I am sure. But if she prefers even these
cares to seeing nothing of the world, they can be borne, and the
annoyances, to a great extent overcome, through patience and growing
experience.

Then, if you start alone, or without being consigned to friends upon the
other side,--which no _young_ woman would think of doing,--you are
almost sure to join, at different times, other parties, whose way is
your own; and far preferable this is to making up a large company before
leaving home--the members of which usually disagree before reaching the
continent, and often part in mutual disgust. "There is nothing like
travelling to bring out a person's real nature," say some. But this is
untrue. Travelling develops, rather than reveals, I think, and under
conditions favorable only to the worse side of one's nature. You are
bewildered by the multitude of strange sights and ways; the very
foundation of usages is broken up; you are putting forth physical
exertions that would seem superhuman at home, and are mentally racked
until utterly exhausted,--for there is nothing so exhausting as
continued sight-seeing,--and at this point people say they begin "to
find each other out."

An occasional period of rest--not staying within doors to study up the
guide-books, but entire cessation from seeing, hearing, or doing--and a
scrap from the mantle of charity, will save many a threatened friendship
at these times. We learned to know our strength--how weak it was; and to
await in some delightful spot, chosen for the purpose, returning energy,
courage, and _interest_; for even that would be banished at times by
utter weariness and exhaustion.

In former times, Americans fitted themselves out for Europe as though
bound to a desert island. Wider intelligence and experience have opened
their eyes and reformed their judgment; still, a word upon this subject
will not be unwe