here are
64,000 dairy-women; women who lift enormous tubs, turn heavy
cheeses, slap butter by the hundred weight. Then come
market-gardeners, bee-mistresses, florists, flax producers and
beaters, haymakers, reapers, and hop-pickers.

In natural connection with the soil, we find seven thousand women
in the mining interest; not harnessed on all-fours to creep
through the shafts, but dressers of ore, and washers and
strainers of clay for the potteries. Next largest to the
agricultural is one not to be exactly calculated--the fishing
interest. The Pilchard fishery employs some thousands of women.
The Jersey oyster fishery alone employs one thousand. Then follow
the herring, cod, whale, and lobster fisheries.

Apart from the Christie Johnstones--the aristocrats of the
trade--the sea nurtures an heroic class like Grace Darling, who
stand aghast when society rewards a deed of humanity, and cry out
in expostulation, "Why, every girl on the coast would have done
as I did!" Then follow the kelp-burners, netters, and bathers.
The netters make the fisherman's nets; the bathers manage the
machines at the watering-places.

And, before quitting this subject, I should like to allude to the
French fishwomen; partly as a matter of curiosity, partly to
prove that women know how to labor. In the reign of Henry IV.,
there existed in Paris a privileged monopoly called the United
Corporation of Fishmongers and Herringers. In the reign of Louis
XIV. this corporation had managed so badly as to become
insolvent. The women who had hawked and vended fish took up the
business, and managed so well as to become very soon a political
power. They became rich, and their children married into good
families. You will remember the atrocities generally ascribed to
them in the first revolution. It is now known that these were
committed by ruffians disguised in their dress.

To return: there are in the United Kingdom 200,000 female
servants. Separate from these, brewers, custom-house searchers,
matrons of jails, lighthouse-keepers, pew-openers.

I have no time to question; but should not a Christian community
offer womanly ministrations to its imprisoned women? Oh, that
some brave heart, in a strong body, might go on our behalf to the
city jail and Charlestown! Pew-o