Both were regularly
harnessed; both pulled alike. This is bad enough; but the Frenchman
adds that, in distributing his lashes, the peasant was obviously
desirous of being impartial; or, if either of the yokefellows had a
right to complain, certainly it was not the donkey. Now, in any country
where such degradation of females could be tolerated by the state of
manners, a woman of delicacy would shrink from acknowledging, either
for herself or her friend, that she had ever been addicted to any mode
of labour not strictly domestic; because, if once owning herself a
praedial servant, she would be sensible that this confession extended by
probability in the hearer's thoughts to the having incurred indignities
of this horrible kind. Haumette clearly thinks it more dignified for
Joanna to have been darning the stockings of her horny-hoofed father,
M. D'Arc, than keeping sheep, lest she might then be suspected of
having ever done something worse. But, luckily, there was no danger of
_that_: Joanna never was in service; and my opinion is that her
father should have mended his own stockings, since probably he was the
party to make the holes in them, as many a better man than D'Arc does--
meaning by _that_ not myself, because, though probably a better man
than D'Arc, I protest against doing anything of the kind. If I lived
even with Friday in Juan Fernandez, either Friday must do all the
darning, or else it must go undone.
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