, yet her skin
is always skin; but often when a man's face has been sheltered from
storm and shine, his skin is hide. His mane is not generally so long
and flowing as a horse's, but there it is. Once, in a car, a man in
front of me put his arm on the back of his seat and fell asleep.
Presently his hand dropped over, and I looked at it,--a mass of broad,
brawny vitality, great pipes of veins, great crescents of nails, great
furrows at the joints, and you might cut a fine sirloin of beef off the
ball of the thumb; and this is a hand! _I_ call it an ox. A woman's
hand, by hard labor, spreads and cracks, and sprouts bunches at the
joints, and becomes tuberous at the ends of the fingers, but you can
see that it is a deformity and not nature. It tells a sad story of
neglect, of labor, perhaps of heartlessness, cruelty, suffering. But
this man's hand was born so. You would not think of pitying him any
more than you would pity an elephant for being an elephant instead of
an antelope. A woman's hair is silky and soft, and, if not always
smooth, susceptible of smoothness. A man's hair is shag. If he tries
to make it anything else, he does not mend the matter. Ceasing to be
shag, it does not become beauty, but foppishness, effeminacy, Miss
Nancy-ism. A man is a brute by the law of his nature. Let him ape a
woman, and he does not cease to be brutal, though he does become
ridiculous. The only thing for him to do is to be the best kind of a
brute.

In all of which remarks there is nothing derogatory to a man,--nothing
at which any one need take offence. I do not say that manhood is not a
very excellent kind of creation. Everything is good in its line. I
would just as soon have been a beetle as a woman, if I had never been a
woman, and did not know what it was. I don't suppose a horse is at all
crestfallen because he is a horse. On the contrary, if he is a
thorough-bred, blood horse, he is a proud and happy fellow, prancing,
spirited, magnificent. So a man may be so magnificently manly that one
shall say, Surely this is the monarch of the universe; and hide and
shag and mane shall be vitalized with a matchless glory. Let a man
make himself grand in his own sphere, and not sit down and moan because
he is only a connecting link between a horse and a woman.

I suppose Mother Church is fully cognizant of the true state of
affairs, and thinks men already sufficiently Satyric, but woman must be
ground down as much as pos