He
fulfilled the debt of strength and the law of social sympathy and
service.

This spirit of sympathetic helpfulness has also given us what is called
"the new womanhood." To-day our civilization is rising to higher
levels. Woman has brought love into law, justice into institutions,
ethics into politics, refinement into the common life. Reforms have
become possible that were hitherto impracticable. King Arthur's
Knights of the Round Table marching forth for freeing some fair lady
were never more soldierly than these who have become the friends and
protectors of the poor. The movement began with Mary Ware, who after
long absence journeyed homeward. While the coach stopped at Durham she
heard of the villages near by where fever was emptying all the homes;
and leaving the coach turned aside to nurse these fever-stridden
creatures and light them through the dark valley. Then came Florence
Nightingale and Mary Stanley, braving rough seas, deadly fever and
bitter cold to nurse sick soldiers in Crimea, and returned to find
themselves broken in health and slaves to pain, like those whom they
remembered. Then rose up a great group of noble women like Mary Lyon
and Sarah Judson, who journeyed forth upon errands of mercy into the
swamps of Africa and the mountains of Asia, making their ways into
garrets and tenements, missionaries of mercy and healing, Knights of
the Red Cross and veritable "King's Daughters." No cottage so remote
as not to feel this new influence.

Fascinating, also, the life-story of that fair, sweet girl who married
Audubon. Yearning for her own home, yet finding that her husband would
journey a thousand miles and give months to studying the home and
haunts of a bird, she gave up her heart-dreams and went with him into
the forest, dwelling now in tents, and now in some rude cabin, being a
wanderer upon the face of the earth--until, when children came, she
remained behind and dwelt apart. At last the naturalist came home
after long absence to fulfill the long-cherished dream of years of
quiet study with wife and children, but found that the mice had eaten
his drawings and destroyed the sketches he had left behind. Then was
he dumb with grief and dazed with pain, but it was his brave wife who
led him to the gate and thrust him forth into the forest and sent him
out upon his mission, saying that there was no valley so deep nor no
wilderness so distant but that his thought, turning homeward, would see