arn the art of war_.'

'With hatpins!' some one called out.

'Yes, scratching and spitting,' another added.

That sort of interruption did not so much embarrass her, but once or
twice she was nearly thrown off her beam-ends by men and boys shouting,
'Wot's the matter with yer anyway? Can't yer get a husband?' and
such-like brilliant relevancies. Although she flushed at some of these
sallies, she stuck to her guns with a pluck that won her friends. In one
of the pauses a choleric old man gesticulated with his umbrella.

'If what the world needed was Woman's Suffrage, it wouldn't have been
left for a minx like you to discover it.' At which volleys of approval.

'That gentleman seems to think it's a new madness that we've recently
invented.' The child seemed in her loneliness to reach out for
companioning. She spoke of 'our friend John Stuart Mill.'

'Oo's Mill?'

'That great Liberal wrote in 1867----' But Mill and she were drowned
together. She waited a moment for the flood of derision to subside.

''E wouldn't 'ad nothin' to do with yer if 'e'd thought you'd go on like
you done.'

'Benjamin Disraeli was on our side. Mazzini--Charles Kingsley. As long
ago as 1870, a Woman's Suffrage Bill that was drafted by Dr. Pankhurst
and Mr. Jacob Bright passed a second reading.'

'The best sort of women _never_ wanted it.'

'The kind of women in the past who cared to be associated with this
reform--they were women like Florence Nightingale, and Harriet
Martineau, and Josephine Butler, and the two thousand other women of
influence who memorialized Mr. Gladstone.'

Something was called out that Vida could not hear, but that brought the
painful scarlet into the young face.

'Shame! shame!' Some of the men were denouncing the interjection.

After a little pause the girl found her voice. 'You make it difficult
for me to tell you what I think you ought to know. I don't believe I
could go on if I didn't see over there the Reformer's Tree. It makes me
think of how much had to be borne before other changes could be brought
about.' She reminded the people of what had been said and suffered on
that very spot in the past, before the men standing before her had got
the liberties they enjoyed to-day.

'They were _men_!'

'Yes, and so perhaps it wasn't so hard for them. I don't know, and I'm
sure it was hard enough. When we women remember what _they
suffered_--though you think meanly of us because we can't be soldiers,
you may a