s well know we are ready to do whatever has to be done--we are
ready to bear whatever has to be borne. There seem to be things harder
to face than bullets, but it doesn't matter, they'll be faced.'

The lady standing with her maid in the incongruous crowd, looked round
once or twice with eyes that seemed to say, 'How much stranger life is
than we are half the time aware, and how much stranger it bids fair to
be!' The rude platform with the scarlet backing flaming in the face of
the glorious summer afternoon, near the very spot upon which the great
battles for Reform had been fought out in the past, and in place of
England's sturdy freeman making his historic appeal for justice, and
admission to the Commons--a girl pouring out this stream of vigorous
English, upholding the cause her family had stood for. Her voice failed
her a little towards the close, or rather it did not so much fail as
betray to any sensitive listener the degree of strain she put upon it to
make it carry above laughter and interjection. As she raised the note
she bent over the crowd, leaning forward, with her neck outstretched,
the cords in it swelling, and the heat of the sun bringing a flush and a
moisture to her face, steadying her voice as the thought of the struggle
to come, shook and clouded it, and calling on the people to judge of
this matter without prejudice. It was a thing to live in the memory--the
vision of that earnest child trying to fire the London louts with the
great names of the past, and failing to see her bite her lip to keep
back tears, and, bending over the rabble, find a choked voice to say--

'If your forefathers and foremothers who suffered for the freedom you
young men enjoy--if they could come out of their graves to-day and see
how their descendants use the great privileges they won--I believe they
would go back into their graves and pull the shrouds over their eyes to
hide them from your shame!'

'Hear! Hear!' 'Right you are.'

But she was done. She turned away, and found friendly hands stretched
out to draw her to a seat.

The next speaker was an alert little woman with a provincial accent and
the briskness of a cock-sparrow, whose prettiness, combined with
pertness, rather demoralized the mob.

'Men and women,' she began, pitching her rather thin voice several notes
too high.

'Men and women!' some one piped in mimicry; and the crowd dissolved in
laughter.

It was curious to note again how that occasional exagge