but no social philosopher can ever do anything but despair of real
progress if he is to take for granted that women are always to play the
part in life which they at present play. The emancipation of the goose
is an experiment, but it is not surprising that many enthusiasts should
believe it to be an experiment well deserving of a trial.

ENGAGEMENTS.

A great writer has pathetically described the last days of a man under
sentence of death. He has found appropriate expression for every phase
of the protracted agony with characteristic richness and variety of
language; we are made to taste each drop in the bitter cup--the remorse
and the awful expectation, and the desperate clinging to deceitful
straws of hope. Indeed it scarcely requires the eloquence of a
first-rate writer to impress upon us the fact that it is very unpleasant
to expect to be hanged. Every man's imagination is sufficient to realize
some of the unpleasant consequences of such a state of mind; for though
the number of persons who have encountered this particular experience is
inconsiderable, most of us have gone through something more or less
analogous--we have been significantly told to wait after school, or have
paid visits to dentists, or have been candidates at competitive
examinations, or have been engaged to be married. These and many other
situations, though varying in the intrinsic pain or pleasure of the
anticipated event, have thus much in common, that they are all states of
abnormal suspense. The nerves are kept in a state of equal tension by
the uncomfortable feeling that we are in for it, whatever the "it" may
turn out to be.

The first impression is simple; it resembles that felt by a man who has
just slipped upon the side of a mountain, and knows that he is
inevitably going to the bottom. He has not time to think whether he will
fall upon snow or rocks, whether he will have merely a pleasant slide or
be dashed into a thousand fragments; he does not make up his mind to be
heroic or to be frightened; the one thought that flashes across his mind
is that here at last is the situation which he has so often feebly
pictured to himself; he will know all about it before he has time to
reflect upon its pains or pleasures. People who have escaped drowning
sometimes assert that they have remembered their whole lives in a few
instants, though it does not quite appear how they can remember that
they remembered the series of incidents without r