ture and her miraculous womb--mystic visitations of radiant forces
hidden eternally from the knowledge of man.

We stand in wonder before the magical germinating properties of a clod of
earth. A grass-seed and a thimbleful of soil set all the sciences at
nought. But if such is the wonder of the mere spectator, how strange to be
the very vessel of the mystery, to know it moving through its mystic
stations within our very bodies, to feel the tender shoots of the young
life striking out blade after blade, already living and wonderful, though
as yet unsuspected of other eyes; to know the underground inarticulate
spring, sweeter far than spring of bird and blossom, while as yet all
seems barren winter in the upper air; to hear already the pathetic
pleadings of the young life, and to send back soothing answer along the
hidden channels of tender tremulous affinities; to lie still in the night
and see through the darkness the little white soul shining softly in its
birth-sleep, slowly filling with life as a moon with silver--it was a
woman and not a man that God chose for this blessedness.

VIRAGOES OF THE BRAIN

The strength of the old-fashioned virago was in her muscles. That of the
newfangled modern development is in her 'reason'--a very different thing
indeed from 'woman's reasons.' As the former knocked you down with her
fist, the latter fells you with her brain. In her has definitely commenced
that evolutionary process which, according to the enchanting dream of a
recent scientist, is to make the 'homo' a creature whose legs are of no
account, poor shrivelled vestiges of once noble calves and thighs; and
whose entire significance will be a noseless, hairless head, in shape and
size like an idiot's, which the scientist, gloating over the ugly duckling
of his distorted imagination, describes as a 'beautiful, glittering,
hairless dome!' A sad period one fears for Gaiety burlesque. In that day
a beautifully shaped leg and a fine head of hair will be rather a
disgrace than a distinction. They will be survivals of a barbarous age.
Indeed that they are already so regarded, there can be no doubt, by the
more 'advanced' representatives of the female sex.

There is one radical difference between the old and the new virago: the
old gloried in the fact that she was a woman, because thus her sex
triumphed over that male whom she despised, like her modern sister, in
proportion as she resembled him. The new virago, however, ha