ght to her court the grandest service they had wrought, their best
thought crystallized in speech and song. Greater than any triumphal
procession that ever marked a royal passage through a kingdom was it to
know that in a score or more of cities, in many a village church on that
same night festive fires were lighted, and the throng kept holiday,
bringing for tribute not gold and gems but noblest aspirations, truest
gratitude, and highest ideals for the nation and the race.

"The great meeting was but one link in a chain; yet with its thousands
of welcoming faces, with its eloquence of words, with its offering of
sweetest song from the children of a race that once was bound but now is
free, with its pictured glimpses of the old time and the new flashing
out upon the night, with the home voices offering welcome and gratitude
and love, with numberless greetings, from the great, true, brave souls
of many lands, it was indeed a wonderful tribute, worthy of the great
warm heart of a nation that offered it, and worthy of the woman so
revered.

"It seemed fitting that Mme. Antoinette Sterling, who, twenty years ago,
took her wonderful voice away to England, where it won for her a unique
place in the hearts of the nation, should, on returning to her country,
give her first service to the womanhood of her native land. 'I am coming
a week earlier,' so she had written, 'that my first work in my own
beloved America may be done for women. I am coming as a woman and not as
an artist, and because I so glory in that which the women of my country
have achieved.' So when she sang out of her heart, 'O rest in the Lord;
wait patiently for him!' no marvel that it seemed to lift all listening
hearts to a recognition of the divine secret and source of power for all
work.

"One charming feature of the entertainment was a series of pictures
called 'Then and Now,' each illustrating the change in woman's condition
during the last fifty years. And after this, upon the dimness there
shone out, one after another, the names of noble women like Mary Lyon,
Maria Mitchell, Emma Willard, and many others who have passed away. Upon
the shadows and the silence broke Mme. Sterling's voice in Tennyson's
'Crossing the Bar.' And when this was over, as with one voice, the whole
audience sang softly 'Auld Lang Syne.'

"And last but not least should be mentioned the greetings that poured in
a shower of telegrams and letters from every section of the country, and