far-off, rude region?"

"Mamma, do you hear that? Here is my own especial father, and your
husband, asking me, a woman, and a very young woman too, for a
reason."

"It is because you are a very young one that he expects you to give
a reason. Perhaps he thinks you will not claim the privilege of our
sex."

"Well, I won't. Now, then, Papa Judge, this is not a far-off, rude
region, and you see that the French ladies want these styles and
fashions, and all that; well, if they want them, we want them too."

"Now I don't quite see. How do you know they want them? Perhaps they
are sent here because they don't want them; and, besides, why should
a backwoods girl in Ohio want what a high-born lady in the French
capital wants?"

"Because the American girl is a woman; and, besides, the court must
hear and decide, and not ask absurd questions."

"And who is to see you in French millinery, here in the woods?"

"Oh, bless its foolish man's heart, that thinks a woman dresses to
please its taste, when it hasn't any! We dress to please ourselves and
plague each other--don't you know that? and we ain't pleased with poky
home-made things."

"Julia! Mother," appealed the Judge, with uplifted hands, to Mrs.
Markham, "where did this young lady get her notions?"

"From the common source of woman's notions, as you call them, I
presume--her feelings and fancies; and she is merely letting you see
the workings of a woman's mind. We should all betray our sex a hundred
times a day, if our blessed husbands and fathers had the power to
understand us, I fear."

"And don't we understand you?"

"Of course you do, as well as you ever will. My dear husband, don't
you also understand that if you fully comprehended us, or we you, we
should lose interest in each other? that now we may be a perpetual
revelation and study to each other, and so never become worn and
common?"

"There, Papa Judge, are you satisfied--not with our arguments, but
with us?"

"The man who was not would be unreasonable and--"

"Man-like," put in Julia. "Let me sing you my new song."

A piano was a novelty in Northern Ohio. Julia played with a real skill
and expression, and her father, though no musician, loved to listen,
and more to hear her sing, with her clear, strong, sweet voice, and so
she played and sang her song.

When she had finished, "By the way," remarked her father, "I
understand that our travelled young townsman, who has just returned
from foreign p