notice her.  She had to stop still and let him lounge by.  I wondered if he had done that piece of brutality purposely.  He strolled to a chair and seated himself at a small table; two or three other males were sitting at similar tables sipping sweetened water.  I waited; presently a youth came by, and this fellow got up and served him the same trick.  Still, it did not seem possible that any one could do such a thing deliberately.  To satisfy my curiosity I went around the block, and, sure enough, as I approached, at a good round speed, he got up and lounged lazily across my path, fouling my course exactly at the right moment to receive all my weight.  This proved that his previous performances had not been accidental, but intentional.

I saw that dandy’s curious game played afterward, in Paris, but not for amusement; not with a motive of any sort, indeed, but simply from a selfish indifference to other people’s comfort and rights.  One does not see it as frequently in Paris as he might expect to, for there the law says, in effect, “It is the business of the weak to get out of the way of the strong.”  We fine a cabman if he runs over a citizen; Paris fines the citizen for being run over.  At least so everybody says—­but I saw something which caused me to doubt; I saw a horseman run over an old woman one day—­the police arrested him and took him away.  That looked as if they meant to punish him.

It will not do for me to find merit in American manners —­for are they not the standing butt for the jests of critical and polished Europe?  Still, I must venture to claim one little matter of superiority in our manners; a lady may traverse our streets all day, going and coming as she chooses, and she will never be molested by any man; but if a lady, unattended, walks abroad in the streets of London, even at noonday, she will be pretty likely to be accosted and insulted—­and not by drunken sailors, but by men who carry the look and wear the dress of gentlemen.  It is maintained that these people are not gentlemen, but are a lower sort, disguised as gentlemen.  The case of Colonel Valentine Baker obstructs that argument, for a man cannot become an officer in the British army except he hold the rank of gentleman.  This person, finding himself alone in a railway compartment with an unprotected girl—­but it is an atrocious story, and doubtless the reader remembers it well enough.  London must have been more or less accustomed to Bakers, and the ways of Bakers, else London would have been offended and excited.  Baker was “imprisoned”—­in a parlor; and he could not have been more visited, or more overwhelmed with attentions, if he had committed six murders and then —­while the gallows was preparing—­“got religion”—­after the manner of the holy Charles Peace, of saintly memory.  Arkansaw—­it seems a little indelicate to be trumpeting forth our own superiorities, and comparisons are always odious, but still—­Arkansaw would certainly have hanged Baker.  I do not say she would have tried him first, but she would have hanged him, anyway.