ing an obsolete
bid for popularity. There was the woman who voted for the man her
father named, and those electors of each sex who voted to the best of
their discernment great or small. Quite a crop of Uncle Jakes were
disfranchised through their rights being back numbers, and the
nobodies who imagined themselves something altogether too lofty to
consider anything so mundane as law-making at all, were also rather
numerous. Ada Grosvenor's bright happy face shone like a star amid her
companions, and she discharged this duty honestly and thoughtfully as
she did all others, recognising it as the practical way of working for
the brave, bright ideals guiding her life.

[Footnote 1: To treat to free drinks.]

Among the electresses were all the same types of vote as cast by men,
except that those sold for a glass of beer were not so frequent; and
as civilisation climbs higher, universal suffrage, and the better
methods of administration to which it will give birth, will be
exercised for the adjustment of the great human question now so
trivially divided into squabbles of sex and class.

The bright Australian sun shone with genial approval on all, and in
the air was a hint of the scent of the jonquils and violets, so early
in that temperate region. Grandma Clay must not be forgotten, for in
her immaculate silk-cloth dress and cape, her bonnet of the best
material, and her "lastings," with her spectacles in one hand and her
properly-prized electoral right in the other, and her irreproachable
respectability oozing from her every action, she could not be
overlooked. As she neared the door the gentlemen and younger ladies
crowding there politely stood back and cancelled their turn in her
favour; and Mrs Martha Clay, a flush on her cheeks, a flash in her
eyes, and with her splendidly active, upright figure carried
valiantly, at the age of seventy-five, disappeared within the
polling-booth to cast her first vote for the State Parliament.

What a girl she must have been in those far-off teens when she had
handled a team of five in Cobb & Co.'s lumbering coaches, when her
curls, blowing in the rain and wind, had been bronze, when with a
feather-weight bound she could spring from the high box-seat to the
ground! Lucky Jim Clay, to have held such vigorous love and splendid
personality all his own. All his own to this late day, for the old
dame returning said to me, "This is a great day to me, and I only wish
that Jim Clay had lived