the present day seem to inherit a
general disposition to leave their wives behind.

The first woman, finding no other man in that garden except her own
husband, took to flirting even with the Devil. The race might have been
saved much tribulation if Eden had been located in some calm and
tranquil land--like Ireland. There would at least have been no snakes
there to get into the garden. Now woman in her thirst after knowledge,
showed her true female inquisitiveness in her cross-examination of the
serpent, and, in commemoration of that circumstance the serpent seems to
have been curled up and used in nearly all languages as a sign of
interrogation. Soon the domestic troubles of our first parents began.
The first woman's favorite son was killed with a club, and married women
even to this day seem to have an instinctive horror of clubs. The first
woman learned that it was Cain that raised a club. The modern woman has
learned that it is a club that raises cain. Yet, I think, I recognize
faces here to-night that I see behind the windows of Fifth Avenue clubs
of an afternoon, with their noses pressed flat against the broad plate
glass, and as woman trips along the sidewalk, I have observed that these
gentlemen appear to be more assiduously engaged than ever was a
government scientific commission, in taking observations upon the
transit of Venus.

Before those windows passes many a face fairer than that of the
Ludovician Juno or the Venus of Medici. There is the Saxon blonde with
the deep blue eye, whose glances return love for love, whose silken
tresses rest upon her shoulders like a wealth of golden fleece, each
thread of which looks like a ray of the morning sunbeam. There is the
Latin brunette with the deep, black, piercing eye, whose jetty lashes
rest like a silken fringe upon the pearly texture of her dainty cheek,
looking like raven's wings spread out upon new-fallen snow.

And yet the club man is not happy. As the ages roll on woman has
materially elevated herself in the scale of being. Now she stops at
nothing. She soars. She demands the co-education of sexes. She thinks
nothing of delving into the most abstruse problems of the higher
branches of analytical science. She can cipher out the exact hour of the
night when her husband ought to be home, either according to the old or
the recently adopted method of calculating time. I never knew of but
one married man who gained any decided domestic advantage by this change