said Humming-Bird, "we all would like to be noble and
heroic. During the war, I did so long to be a man! I felt so poor and
insignificant because I was nothing but a girl!"

"Ah, well," said Pheasant, "but then one wants to do something worth
doing, if one is going to do anything. One would like to be grand and
heroic, if one could; but if not, why try at all? One wants to be
_very_ something, _very_ great, _very_ heroic; or if not that, then at
least very stylish and very fashionable. It is this everlasting
mediocrity that bores me."

"Then, I suppose, you agree with the man we read of, who buried his
one talent in the earth, as hardly worth caring for."

"To say the truth, I always had something of a sympathy for that man,"
said Pheasant. "I can't enjoy goodness and heroism in homoeopathic
doses. I want something appreciable. What I can do, being a woman, is
a very different thing from what I should try to do if I were a man,
and had a man's chances: it is so much less--so poor--that it is
scarcely worth trying for."

"You remember," said I, "the apothegm of one of the old divines, that
if two angels were sent down from heaven, the one to govern a kingdom,
and the other to sweep a street, they would not feel any disposition
to change works."

"Well, that just shows that they are angels, and not mortals," said
Pheasant; "but we poor human beings see things differently."

"Yet, my child, what could Grant or Sherman have done, if it had not
been for the thousands of brave privates who were content to do each
their imperceptible little,--if it had not been for the poor,
unnoticed, faithful, never-failing common soldiers, who did the work
and bore the suffering? No _one_ man saved our country, or could save
it; nor could the men have saved it without the women. Every mother
that said to her son, Go; every wife that strengthened the hands of
her husband; every girl who sent courageous letters to her betrothed;
every woman who worked for a fair; every grandam whose trembling hands
knit stockings and scraped lint; every little maiden who hemmed shirts
and made comfort-bags for soldiers,--each and all have been the joint
doers of a great heroic work, the doing of which has been the
regeneration of our era. A whole generation has learned the luxury of
thinking heroic thoughts and being conversant with heroic deeds, and I
have faith to believe that all this is not to go out in a mere crush
of fashionable luxury and folly