rist mills of her father, run by engines
of two- and three-hundred horse-power, which she sometimes managed
for amusement. When her name was proposed for running the pavilion
machinery it brought much opposition. It was said the committee
would some day find the pavilion blown to atoms; that the woman
engineer would spend her time reading novels, instead of watching
the steam gauge; that the idea was impracticable and should not be
thought of. But Miss Alison soon proved her own capabilities and
the falseness of these prophecies by taking her place in the
engine-room and managing its workings with the ease that a child
spins a top. Six power looms on which women wove carpets, webbing,
silks, etc., were run by this engine. At a later period the
printing of _The New Century for Women_, a paper published by the
centennial commission in the woman's building, was also done by its
means. Miss Alison declared the work to be more cleanly, more
pleasant, and infinitely less fatiguing than cooking over a kitchen
stove. "Since I have been compelled to earn my own livelihood," she
said, "I have never been engaged in work I liked so well. Teaching
school is much harder, and one is not paid as well." She expressed
confidence in her ability to manage the engine of an ocean steamer,
and said there were thousands of small engines in use in various
parts of the country, and no reason existed why women should not be
employed to manage them--following the profession of engineer as a
regular business--an engine requiring far less attention than is
given by a nurse-maid or mother to a child.

But to have made the woman's pavilion grandly historic, upon its
walls should have been hung the yearly protest of Harriet K. Hunt
against taxation without representation; the legal papers served
upon the Smith sisters when their Alderny cows were seized and sold
for their refusal to pay taxes while unrepresented; the papers held
by the city of Worcester for the forced sale of the house and lands
of Abby Kelly Foster, the veteran abolitionist, because she refused
to pay taxes, giving the same reason our ancestors gave when they
resisted taxation; a model of Bunker Hill monument, its foundation
laid by Lafayette in 1825, but which remained unfinished nearly
twenty years until the famous French _danseuse_ Fanny Ellsler, gave
the proceeds of an exhibition for that purpose. With these should
have been exhibited framed copies of all the laws bearing unjustl