them on her nose, she put her arms
akimbo, and looking up, said: "Well, I've just come down here a runnin'
nigh onto two mile, right on the clean jump, just to get a look at the
man that lets the women do all the talkin'."

The first regular speaker of the evening (William M. Evarts) touched
upon woman, but only incidentally, only in reference to Mormonism and
that sad land of Utah, where a single death may make a dozen widows.

A speaker at the New England dinner in Brooklyn last night (Henry Ward
Beecher) tried to prove that the Mormons came originally from New
Hampshire and Vermont. I know that a New Englander sometimes in the
course of his life marries several times; but he takes the precaution
to take his wives in their proper order of legal succession. The
difference is that he drives his team of wives tandem, while the Mormon
insists upon driving his abreast.

But even the least serious of us, Mr. President, have some serious
moments in which to contemplate the true nobility of woman's character.
If she were created from a rib, she was made from that part which lies
nearest a man's heart.

It has been beautifully said that man was fashioned out of the dust of
the earth while woman was created from God's own image. It is our pride
in this land that woman's honor is her own best defense; that here
female virtue is not measured by the vigilance of detective nurses; that
here woman may walk throughout the length and the breadth of this land,
through its highways and byways, uninsulted, unmolested, clothed in the
invulnerable panoply of her own woman's virtue; that even in places
where crime lurks and vice prevails in the haunts of our great cities,
and in the rude mining gulches of the West, owing to the noble efforts
of our women, and the influence of their example, there are raised, even
there, girls who are good daughters, loyal wives, and faithful mothers.
They seem to rise in those rude surroundings as grows the pond lily,
which is entangled by every species of rank growth, environed by poison,
miasma and corruption, and yet which rises in the beauty of its purity
and lifts its fair face unblushing to the sun.

No one who has witnessed the heroism of America's daughters in the field
should fail to pay a passing tribute to their worth. I do not speak
alone of those trained Sisters of Charity, who in scenes of misery and
woe seem Heaven's chosen messengers on earth; but I would speak also of
those fair daugh