essie
Boucherett's essay on "Superfluous Women," in which she advises men in
England to emigrate in order to leave room and occupation for women, the
_Tribune_ said: "The idea of a home without a man in it!" In visiting
the Carys one always felt that there was a home--a very charming one,
too--without a man in it.

Once when Harriet Beecher Stowe was at Dr. Taylor's, I had the
opportunity to make her acquaintance. In her sanctum, surrounded by
books and papers, she was just finishing her second paper on the Byron
family, and her sister Catherine was preparing papers on her educational
work, preparatory to a coming meeting of the ladies of the school board.
The women of the Beecher family, though most of them wives and mothers,
all had a definite life-work outside the family circle, and other
objects of intense interest beside husbands, babies, cook stoves, and
social conversations. Catherine said she was opposed to woman suffrage,
and if she thought there was the least danger of our getting it, she
would write and talk against it vehemently. But, as the nation was safe
against such a calamity, she was willing to let the talk go on, because
the agitation helped her work. "It is rather paradoxical," I said to
her, "that the pressing of a false principle can help a true one; but
when you get the women all thoroughly educated, they will step off to
the polls and vote in spite of you."

One night on the train from New York to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, I
found abundant time to think over the personal peculiarities of the many
noble women who adorn this nineteenth century, and, as I recalled them,
one by one, in America, England, France, and Germany, and all that they
are doing and saying, I wandered that any man could be so blind as not
to see that woman has already taken her place as the peer of man. While
the lords of creation have been debating her sphere and drawing their
chalk marks here and there, woman has quietly stepped outside the barren
fields where she was compelled to graze for centuries, and is now in
green pastures and beside still waters, a power in the world of thought.

These pleasant cogitations were cut short by my learning that I had
taken the wrong train, and must change at Harrisburg at two o'clock in
the morning. How soon the reflection that I must leave my comfortable
berth at such an unchristian hour changed the whole hue of glorious
womanhood and every other earthly blessing! However, I lived th