Year: 1876

daughter would ask, with her shrewd sense,
"What did she care for the clothes of q book r.
or "Why should she value thing simply
because other people could not get it !" Nor Is
there solitary volume Of popular science, such
"a the lady lecturer skins over to find tell
cling ponts;n our little country girl classes
Huxley and Darwin with VOltaire and Tom
Paine labels them all "POisOn and puts like
deaths head and crOss-bones on each. one
taught the district school two Winters (to heip
send her brother to cOllege). You Will hnd her
therefore well informed as to cube-r0ots and
mountains in Africa; she studied Latln Vo
help her brother with his lessons at night), can
read Horace with dictionary, but never does
it; Ruskin is her high priest of literature; she
has no patience with Emerson's "transcen-
"dental stuff" she knows LOngfellow by heart
and appeases all other intellectual hun
ger by unlimited supplies of harmless religious
novels. The hunger of soul or life, which
cleverer women complain of, she never 1eit;
she has no lOngings for career, other than
that which lies in the snug brick house at the
end of the lane, where the young doctor lives
alone. She does not admit that wish to her
self without blush even when alone. This



pink-cheeked little girl who has a saucy VIII
of her own, grows painfully stiff and silent
when the awkward young doctor IS near.
When the story went about that he was Drlng-
ing wife from town, or when her old father
lay DYING as she thought, or when any
ether pain or loss has touched her, she
has but one resource, the worn old Bible
which she has read night and morning since
she was a child. IIc who speaks to her there
is no vague abstraction, but the Friend whom
she knows best There is every probability
that she will marry the doctor some day, and
can vegetables, and sew, and bear children,
lust as her mother did before her. There Will
be no great ambition satisfied. no tragedy,
divorce, or public denouement of any sort IN
her life. If husband OF children should need
great sacrifices, she will make them II one OF
them should ever be chosen to the first station
in the land, she will bear her place in the
White House with simple wOmanly dignity
the best of good breeding.


The great event of her life, so far, is coming
next month. The whole family arc going to
the Exposition in Philadelphia. Our little
rustic will pay very little attention to brlc-a-
brac or ceramic ware. She does not know
terra Gotta from Sevres; she is not likely
either to linger long before the pictures, or
any works of art; but the wonderful plants OF
all countries will hold her like encha2tment;
nobody who goes to the great cOncourse Will
catch shrewder, juster glimpses of the strange
phases of human nature gathered there; and
when she enters the old hall where her country
had its birth, and reverently touches the cracked
1 n l,o no LOYALTY n
child No doubt, when she comes to the womans
department. she will be elated and bOastful as to
the achievements of her sex; not percelylng
that she and the vast obscure sisterhood to
which she belongs, chaste, modest, practical
women faithful wives and tender mothers, are
the chief product of American domestic life in
the past century, and the product to which her
country can most safely and proudly point.