LADIES’ TRAINS.
“Mr. Punch,
“As you devote a considerable part of your columns to the exposure, with a view to the correction, of the too many bad habits of the female sex, I will trouble you, if you will let me, to denounce a gross annoyance which ladies who travel by railway are very apt to inflict upon their fellow-passengers.
“The annoyance to which I allude is that of causing both windows of the carriage to be closed, even in the mildest weather, and thus obliging all the people who are in it to continue for some hours breathing an atmosphere consisting chiefly of the products of their own respiration.
“I was served this trick, Sir, by a foolish woman only the other day. She asked me if I had any objection to have the window, by which I was sitting up. I made no answer, but raised it a foot or so, leaving room for the escape of the air which we were contaminating. There were some half-dozen of us all together, stifling ourselves in our own breath. This was not enough to satisfy her, and presently she desired to know if I had any objection to close the window altogether. I grinned, and did it. Our united exhalations instantly condensed on the inside of the glass, and I had to rub a hole in the dew which was formed by them in order that I might look out.
“Is this lady aware that she continually gives out a lot of carbonic acid gas and watery vapour from her chest, and that other people exhale the same matters, of which the repeated respiration is unwholesome, although she may not consider it unpleasant? Sir, I wish to impress upon the female mind, that fresh air is salubrious, and that foul air is poison, and that women commonly entertain an excessive fear of the effect upon the chest of slight cold, and a reckless disregard of the pulmonary influence of gross contamination.
“For fear, however, lest instruction should be refused,- as it certainly will by the majority of those to whom it is offered,- I would request Railway Directors to take steps for enabling reasonable creatures to secure themselves from being half suffocated in railway carriages by travellers of the opposite sex. Let ladies’ carriages be provided expressly for ladies, and for those men whom choice may cause to prefer such insanitary travelling-companions. How inconsistent it is to prohibit healthy smoking in railway trains, whilst unwholesome fuming is permitted to any amount without regard to ventilation!
“Sir, women are willing enough to let you waste your breath when you attempt to talk to them for their good, or for your own, and they might not be so desirous, as they mostly are, to make you consume it a hundred times over. But so it is. I say, then, let female railway travellers have special carriages, if they needs must sit with closed windows; let them have locomotive Black Holes of Calcutta all to themselves, and to those who may be willing to share their suffocation for the sake of their society, amongst whim will certainly not be included your elderly reader,
“Oxygen.”
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