es at the mass meeting. They stamped their feet, they hooted,
they looked at the still empty stage and demanded to know where were the
leaders of the "Crinoline Campaign." They whispered and nudged each
other and shouted ribald laughter.

At ten minutes to three o'clock a line of women filed on the rostrum and
took their chairs at the back of it. They were the representatives of
the Co-Citizens' County Leagues. There were twenty-five of them, and
they ranged in age and dignity all the way from Granny White, who was
seventy, to the youngest bride from Apple Valley. Granny White looked
like a crooked letter of the female alphabet in a peroda waist frock
with a very full skirt, and a black silk sunbonnet upon her old palsied
head, which wagged incessantly. The bride wore her wedding dress, which
was now a trifle too tight for her. She looked like a pale young Madonna
scarcely able to bear the weighty honour which had been thrust upon her.
Some of the other women were enormously fat, some were pathetically
lean, but they all faced the jeering crowd below with amazing
assurance. They represented the harvest of all the virtues and sorrows
and sacrifices of women for centuries, and all unconsciously they showed
it with a calm accusing majesty.

The audience, which was largely composed of men, stared at them and grew
suddenly silent. They recognized their wives and mothers in those serene
faces, and manhood forbids that you should hoot at your own
blood-and-bone kin womenfolk. So they changed the subject. They began to
talk, a perfect hurricane of inconsequential comments on every
imaginable subject except the subject of women and their rights.

Promptly at three o'clock Judge Regis came through a side door upon the
rostrum, accompanied by Susan Walton and Selah Adams. The women took
their places in two empty chairs among those at the back; the Judge
approached the table in the middle of the rostrum, stood for a moment, a
tall and elegant figure, looking out over the sea of faces below him.
Then, lifting the gavel, he rapped for order.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he began in slow, distinct tones, "I have the
honour and privilege of opening the most remarkable meeting ever held in
this county or state. We are about to make history, which is becoming
to this memorial day of American Independence. I shall not address you
upon the momentous issue at hand. Others far more capable will speak to
you presently on that. I shall only sta