oagulates a bowl of sweet milk? Can an
acquaintance with literature, art, and science so paralyze a lady's
energies, that she is rendered utterly averse to and incapable of
performing those domestic offices, those household duties, so
pre-eminently suited to her slender, dexterous busy little fingers?
Why, my own wise precious little mother is a living refutation
of so grossly absurd and monstrous a dogma! Have not you boxed my
ears, because, when stumbling through the 'Anabasis,' my Greek
pronunciation tortured your fastidious and correct taste? Did not you
tell me that you read nearly the whole of Sallust by spreading the
book open on the dairy shelf while you churned, thus saving time? And
did not that same sweet golden butter, made under the shadow of a
Latin dictionary, win you the State Fair Premium, of that very silver
cup, from which I drank my milk, as long as I wore knee-pants and
round jackets? Was it not my father's fond boast that his wife's
proficiency in music was equalled only by her wonderful skill in
making muffins, pastry, and _omelette soujflee?_"

With genuine chivalric tenderness in look and tone he inclined his
head; but though a tear certainly glistened in Mrs. Lindsay's bright
eyes, she answered gayly:

"Am I Cerberus, to be coaxed and cheated by a well-buttered sop of
flattery? Return to your mutton, reverend sir, and know that I am
incorruptible, and disdain to betray my cause for your thirty pieces
of potent praise."

"I think," said Mr. Hargrove, taking a bunch of cherries from the
fruit-stand on the library table,--"I think the whole matter may be
resolved into this; the ambitious clamours and Amazonian excesses of
this epoch, are the inevitable consequence of the rigid tyranny of
former ages; which sternly banished women to the numbing darkness of
an intellectual night, denying them the legitimate and natural right
of developing their faculties by untrammelled exercise. This belief
in feminine inferiority is still expressed in Mohammedan lands, by
the custom of placing a slate or tablet of marble on a woman's grave,
while on that of men a pen or penholder is laid, to indicate that
female hearts are mere tablets, on which man writes whatever pleases
him best. In sociology, as well as physics and dynamics,--the angle
of reflection is always equal to the angle of incidence,--the
psychologic rebound is ever in proportion to the mental pressure; one
extreme invariably impinges upon the oppo