ler here suggest that although the human female soul is
embodied in the children of Ham, Shem, and Japhet, the mighty law
referred to is binding only upon that Anglo-British-Saxon-Norman
division of Japhet's daughters domiciled in and emanating from the
British Isles? Let us proudly reply that in considering the result of a
process we consider the whole; and let us meekly add that to our mind
the Anglo-British-Saxon-Norman woman, perfected under an American sky,
is the woman of the world; and finally, let us point to the
two-and-twenty heroines of that Monday as chief among American women,
for they were the Pilgrim Mothers of the New World.

The Pilgrim Fathers were there also; and they, too, were exemplifying a
law of nature, that is to say, a law of male nature in every clime and
every age. They did not love Washing Day. They felt no joy in the
possibility of its observance, they felt no need of its processes. And
yet again _more humano_, they did not openly set themselves against it,
they did not frankly express their unworthy content in their present
estate, but they feebly suggested that as the observance had been some
weeks omitted, with no sensible loss of comfort to themselves, it might
well be farther postponed; that the facilities were by no means
remarkable; that rain was very possible, and that they had to apply
themselves without delay to unshipping the pinnace from the hold of the
Mayflower, and fitting her for the immediate service of exploration.

To these arguments the women meekly responded that in the nature of
things they were better fitted to judge of the emergency than their
lords, whose attention must be absorbed in matters of so much higher
import; that they did not require the help of any man whose work upon
the pinnace would be at all important, and that the sandy beach, the
pool of fresh water, and the clumps of stunted shrubs fairly spread upon
the shore in front of them were all the facilities they required. As for
the weather, as Dame Hopkins piously remarked:--

"If Monday's weather be not fit for washing, there is no promise in Holy
Writ of anything better in the rest of the week."

"Oh, if thou r't bent on washing, the shrewdest storm that ever swept
the Zuyder Zee will never stop thee; so get thy rags together as soon as
may be," growled her husband, a grizzled, hard-visaged veteran some
twenty years older than this his second wife of whom he was very fond.

"Nay, then," interposed