y, and the laws
of life and health. We made many most charming acquaintances, too,
scattered all over our Western World, and saw how comfortable and happy
sensible people could be, living in most straitened circumstances, with
none of the luxuries of life. If most housekeepers could get rid of
one-half their clothes and furniture and put their bric-a-brac in the
town museum, life would be simplified and they would begin to know what
leisure means. When I see so many of our American women struggling to be
artists, who cannot make a good loaf of bread nor a palatable cup of
coffee, I think of what Theodore Parker said when art was a craze in
Boston. "The fine arts do not interest me so much as the coarse arts
which feed, clothe, house, and comfort a people. I would rather be a
great man like Franklin than a Michael Angelo--nay, if I had a son, I
should rather see him a mechanic, like the late George Stephenson, in
England, than a great painter like Rubens, who only copied beauty."

One day I found at the office of the _Revolution_ an invitation to meet
Mrs. Moulton in the Academy of Music, where she was to try her voice for
the coming concert for the benefit of the Woman's Medical College. And
what a voice for power, pathos, pliability! I never heard the like.
Seated beside her mother, Mrs. W.H. Greenough, I enjoyed alike the
mother's anxious pride and the daughter's triumph. I felt, as I
listened, the truth of what Vieuxtemps said the first time he heard her,
"That is the traditional voice for which the ages have waited and
longed." When, on one occasion, Mrs. Moulton sang a song of Mozart's to
Auber's accompaniment, someone present asked, "What could be added to
make this more complete?" Auber looked up to heaven, and, with a sweet
smile, said, "Nothing but that Mozart should have been here to listen."
Looking and listening, "Here," thought I, "is another jewel in the crown
of womanhood, to radiate and glorify the lives of all." I have such an
intense pride of sex that the triumphs of woman in art, literature,
oratory, science, or song rouse my enthusiasm as nothing else can.

Hungering, that day, for gifted women, I called on Alice and Phebe Cary
and Mary Clemmer Ames, and together we gave the proud white male such a
serving up as did our souls good and could not hurt him, intrenched, as
he is, behind creeds, codes, customs, and constitutions, with vizor and
breastplate of self-complacency and conceit. In criticising J