rkpatrick, violently
interrupting her, "and me as dacent a woman as ever she was, or ever
will be! Disgraced, hey? Oh, I'll larn her what it is to blaggard her
betters!"

And before anybody could imagine what was coming, she pounced upon Mrs.
Whiston, with one jerk ripped off her skirt (it was silk, not serge,
this time), seized her by the hair, and gave her head such a twist
backwards, that the chignon not only came off in her hands, but as her
victim opened her mouth too widely in the struggle, the springs of her
false teeth were sprung the wrong way, and the entire set flew out and
rattled upon the floor.

Of course there were cries of "Order! Order!" and the nearest
members--Mr. Gorham among the first--rushed in; but the mischief was
done. Mrs. Whiston had always urged upon our minds the necessity of
not only being dressed according to the popular fashion, but also as
elegantly and becomingly as possible. "If we adopt the Bloomers," she
said, "we shall never get our rights, while the world stands. Where it
is necessary to influence men, we must be wholly and truly WOMEN, not
semi-sexed nondescripts; we must employ every charm Nature gives us and
Fashion adds, not hide them under a forked extinguisher!" I give her
very words to show you her way of looking at things. Well, now imagine
this elegant woman, looking not a day over forty, though she was--but
no, I have no right to tell it,--imagine her, I say, with only her
scanty natural hair hanging over her ears, her mouth dreadfully fallen
in, her skirt torn off, all in open day, before the eyes of a hundred
and fifty members (and I am told they laughed immensely, in spite of the
scandal that it was), and, if you are human beings, you will feel that
she must have been wounded to the very heart.

There was a motion made to expel Nelly Kirkpatrick, and perhaps it
might have succeeded--but the railroad hands, all over the State, made a
heroine of her, and her party was afraid of losing five or six thousand
votes; so only a mild censure was pronounced. But there was no end
to the caricatures, and songs, and all sorts of ribaldry, about the
occurrence; and even our party said that, although Mrs. Whiston was
really and truly a martyr, yet the circumstance was an immense damage
to THEM. When she heard THAT, I believe it killed her. She resigned her
seat, went home, never appeared again in public, and died within a year.
"My dear friend," she wrote to me, not a month before