ad, I'd vote against it, and if they hadn't,
I'd vote for it. One o' their bills,' says he, 'sounded mighty
reasonable, the "forestry bill," they called it, but it never come
up.' Says he, 'We had a little redistricting to do for the benefit o'
the party, and made a few new offices jest to please the people, and
betwixt this and that,' says he, 'we didn't git round to the forestry
bill.' Says he, 'I might 'a' supported that, if it had come up, but
then I don't know but what after all it'd 'a' been a dangerous sort o'
thing.' Says he: 'The more you give a woman the more she wants. We
give women their property rights, and now they're wantin' to vote and
to manage the schools and the 'sylums and pretty near everything else.
And,' says he, 'if we was to pass that there forestry bill, like as
not the first thing you know, a man'd have to git a permit from some
o' these women's clubs before he could chop a piece o' kindlin'-wood
in his own back yard.'

"And then the old man went on to tell how he went up to Lexin'ton
after the legislature was over, and that was what he meant by goin' to
Sodom and Gomorrah. Says he, 'There's women up there, Jane, that don't
know a water-bucket from a churn, and if you was to show 'em a
potater-patch in full bloom, they'd think it was some sort of a
flower-gyarden.' Says he, 'The clubs was more numerous than the
children, and it looks to me like the race is dyin' out, dyin' out,
Jane; and maybe it's jest as well,' says he, 'for there ain't any
women nowadays like the old-time ones, for instance, my mother and
grandmother,' says he."

Aunt Jane broke off with a laugh. "I knew as soon as he started out
that he was comin' to his mother and grandmother. Uncle Billy couldn't
talk twenty minutes with anybody without tellin' 'em how his mother
had fifteen children, and cooked and sewed and washed and ironed for
'em all, and how his grandmother was one o' the women that carried
water at Bryan's Station, and how she fought a wildcat one night on
the Wilderness Road when her husband was away killin' some game for
their supper.

"Well, I went to this club meetin', I can't ricollect jest what
Henrietta called it, but it seems they had got together to tell about
all the work they'd done in the past year, and plan out their next
year's work.

"There was one lady I took particular notice of. I thought she was a
married woman, but I heard 'em callin' her 'Miss Laura,' and I found
out afterwards that she