ed by his
wife.

The _Visiter_ was three years old when he turned one day, examined me
critically, and exclaimed:

"Why do you wear those hideous caps? You seem to have good hair. Mrs.
Riddle says she knows you have, and she and some ladies were wondering
only yesterday, why you do make yourself such a fright."

The offending cap was a net scarf tied under the chin, and I said, "You
know I am subject to quinsy, and this cap protects my tonsils."

He turned away with a sigh, and did not suspect that my tonsils had no
such protection outside the office, where I must meet a great many
gentlemen and make it apparent that what I wanted of them was votes!
votes!! Votes for the women sold on the auction block, scourged for
chastity, robbed of their children, and that admiration was no part of
my object.

Any attempt to aid business by any feminine attraction was to my mind
revolting in the extreme, and certain to bring final defeat. In nothing
has the church of Rome shown more wisdom than in the costume of her
female missionaries. When a woman starts out in the world on a mission,
secular or religious, she should leave her feminine charms at home. Had
I made capital of my prettiness, I should have closed the doors of
public employment to women for many a year, by the very means which now
makes them weak, underpaid competitors in the great workshop of the
world.

One day Mr. Riddle said:

"I wish you had been here yesterday. Robert Watson called. He wanted to
congratulate us on the relations we have for so long maintained. We have
never spoken of it, but you must have known the risk of coming here. He
has seen it, says he has watched you closely, and you are an exception
to all known law, or the harbinger of a new era in human progress."

Robert Watson was a retired lawyer of large wealth, who watched the
world from his study, and philosophized about its doings; and when Mr.
Riddle had given me this conclusion, the subject was never again
referred to in our years of bargaining, buying and selling, paying and
receipting.

CHAPTER XXII.

RECEPTION OF THE VISITER.

While preparing matter for the first number of the _Visiter_, I had time
to think that so far as any organization was concerned, I stood alone. I
could not work with Garrison on the ground that the Constitution was
pro-slavery, for I had abandoned that in 1832, when our church split on
it and I went with the New School, who held that it was then
an