Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. I.djvu/351

Rh full of an educational spirit. It is customary in the Cantons Vaud and Geneva, for every young girl, after her first communion, to take upon herself the instruction and charge of a poor child. I have rarely met with peculiarity of character among the ladies; the requirement and aspiration of higher intelligence, more rarely still. Domestic life, the religious life, and nature, seem to be all suffering for the generality. The woman in Switzerland, who enjoys, at the present time, the largest mental horizon, and who, with the most ardent heart, embraces the highest interests of social life, and who regards the Swiss Confederation from its highest point of view, is not a woman of Switzerland at all, but a daughter our unenfranchised country, of the people of Roumelia, Countess Dora d'Istria.

The men appear to me to be of sterling character, prudent and energetic, but many of them have, as regards the other sex, a good deal to learn from the French, and even from Englishmen. The Swiss man, it appears to me, does not often regard his wife, according to the requirement of the beautiful Swedish term, Maka, or equal; and not unfrequently, an otherwise good and distinguished man, deserves the satire which the little son of one of my acquaintance, on one occasion, unconsciously expressed, when he said to his little sister:

“Now, thou shalt be my wife. Go and stand in the corner!”

—“But why must I be thy wife?”

—“That I may have somebody to scold!”