them,
which were received by the Welds, in many cases, years after they had
parted from the writers, were treasured as their most precious
souvenirs, and quite reconciled them to the trials through which such
results were reached.

A short time before leaving Belleville, Mrs. Weld and Sarah adopted
the Bloomer costume on account of its convenience, and the greater
freedom it permitted in taking long rambles, but neither of them ever
admired it or urged its adoption on others. Mrs. Weld, it is true,
wrote a long and eloquent letter to the Dress Reform Convention which
met in Syracuse in the summer of 1857, but it was not to advocate the
Bloomer, but to show the need of some dress more suitable than the
fashionable one, for work and exercise. She also urged that as woman
was no longer in her minority, no longer "man's pretty idol before
whom he bowed in chivalric gallantry," or "his petted slave whom he
coaxed and gulled with sugar-plum privileges, whilst robbing her of
intrinsic rights," but was emerging into her majority and claiming her
rights as a human being, and waking up to a higher destiny: as she was
beginning to answer the call to a life of useful exertion and
honorable independence, it was time that she dressed herself in
accordance with the change. "I regard the Bloomer costume," she says,
"as only an approach to that true womanly attire which will in due
time be inaugurated. We must experiment before we find a dress
altogether suitable.... Man has long enough borne the burden of
supporting the women of the civilized world. When woman's temple of
liberty is finished--when freedom for the world is achieved--when she
has educated herself into useful and lucrative occupations, then may
she fitly expend upon her person _her own earnings_, not man's. Such
women will have an indefeasible right to dress elegantly if they wish,
but they will discard cumbersomeness and a useless and absurd
circumference and length."

Sarah says, in a letter to a friend, that the Bloomer dress violated
her taste, and was so opposed to her sense of modesty that she could
hardly endure it. During the residence at Eagleswood, both sisters
discarded it altogether.

The John Brown tragedy was of course deeply felt by Sarah and
Angelina, and the bitter and desperate feelings which inspired it
fully sympathized with. Angelina was made quite ill by it, while Sarah
felt her soul bowed with reverence for the deluded but grand old man.
"O Sa