sit, open-eyed and
expectant, watching the removal of the successive swathings which hide
from you the dusky glories of an old-time princess, and, when the
unrolling is over, to find it is nothing, after all, but a great
lubberly boy. Equally trying is it to feel your interest clustering
round a narrator's manhood, all your individuality merging in his, till,
of a sudden, by the merest chance, you catch the swell of crinoline,
and there you are. Away with such clumsiness! Let us have everybody
christened before we begin.

I do, therefore, with Spartan firmness depose and say that I am a woman.
I am aware that I place myself at signal disadvantage by the avowal. I
fly in the face of hereditary prejudice. I am thrust at once beyond
the pale of masculine sympathy. Men will neither credit my success nor
lament my failure, because they will consider me poaching on their
manor. If I chronicle a big beet, they will bring forward one twice
as large. If I mourn a deceased squash, they will mutter, "Woman's
farming!" Shunning Scylla, I shall perforce fall into Charybdis. (_Vide_
Classical Dictionary. I have lent mine, but I know one was a rock and
the other a whirlpool, though I cannot state, with any definiteness,
which was which.) I may be as humble and deprecating as I choose, but
it will not avail me. A very agony of self-abasement will be no armor
against the poisoned shafts which assumed superiority will hurl against
me. Yet I press the arrow to my bleeding heart, and calmly reiterate, I
am a woman.

The full magnanimity of which reiteration can be perceived only when I
inform you that I could easily deceive you, if I chose. There is about
my serious style a vigor of thought, a comprehensiveness of view, a
closeness of logic, and a terseness of diction commonly supposed to
pertain only to the stronger sex. Not wanting in a certain fanciful
sprightliness which is the peculiar grace of woman, it possesses also,
in large measure, that concentrativeness which is deemed the peculiar
strength of man. Where an ordinary woman will leave the beaten track,
wandering in a thousand little by ways of her own,--flowery and
beautiful, it is true, and leading her airy feet to "sunny spots of
greenery" and the gleam of golden apples, but keeping her not less
surely from the goal,--I march straight on, turning neither to the
right hand nor to the left, beguiled into no side-issues, discussing no
collateral question, but with keen eye and