ivilege of caprice. Barring these cases, I must adhere to my
resolution of telling no fibs. And I repeat, therefore, but not to be rude,
I repeat in Latin--

Excudent alii melius spirantia signa,
Credo equidem vivos ducent de marmore vultus:
Altius ascendent: at tu caput, Eva, memento
Sandalo ut infringas referenti oracula tanta.[6]

Yet, sister woman--though I cannot consent to find a Mozart or a Michael
Angelo in your sex, until that day when you claim my promise as to
falsehood--cheerfully, and with the love that burns in depths of
admiration, I acknowledge that you can do one thing as well as the best of
us men--a greater thing than even Mozart is known to have done, or Michael
Angelo--you can die grandly, and as goddesses would die were goddesses
mortal. If any distant world (which _may_ be the case) are so far ahead
of us Tellurians in optical resources as to see distinctly through their
telescopes all that we do on earth, what is the grandest sight to which we
ever treat them? St. Peter's at Rome, do you fancy, on Easter Sunday, or
Luxor, or perhaps the Himalayas? Pooh! pooh! my friend: suggest something
better; these are baubles to _them_; they see in other worlds, in their
own, far better toys of the same kind. These, take my word for it, are
nothing. Do you give it up? The finest thing, then, we have to show them
is a scaffold on the morning of execution. I assure you there is a strong
muster in those fair telescopic worlds, on any such morning, of those who
happen to find themselves occupying the right hemisphere for a peep
at _us_. Telescopes look up in the market on that morning, and bear a
monstrous premium; for they cheat, probably, in those scientific worlds as
well as we do. How, then, if it be announced in some such telescopic world
by those who make a livelihood of catching glimpses at our newspapers,
whose language they have long since deciphered, that the poor victim in the
morning's sacrifice is a woman? How, if it be published on that distant
world that the sufferer wears upon her head, in the eyes of many, the
garlands of martyrdom? How, if it should be some Marie Antoinette, the
widowed queen, coming forward on the scaffold, and presenting to the
morning air her head, turned gray prematurely by sorrow, daughter of Caesars
kneeling down humbly to kiss the guillotine, as one that worships death?
How, if it were the "martyred wife of Roland," uttering impassioned
truth--truth odious to the