arrelling with him. To
be sure he's a shallow kind of a philosopher, one of your rationalists;
thinks Boston is the linchpin of the whole universe; has autograph
letters from Emerson and Longfellow, and all that sort of thing. Now, I
dare say it's very fine for a Schelling or a Hegel once in a while to
beam over the earth, but it always seems inharmonious to me to see
little jets of philosophers popping up in your face and then down again,
all the time, thinking themselves great things. That's the way with
Leon. Let me tell you what happened when I saw him last; and that was in
Cologne, more than a year ago. I was sitting in our room with a great
folio of Retzsch's engravings before me, and father writing horrible
notes in his journal at the table, and wishing the eleven thousand
virgins and all Cologne in the bottom of the Rhine, when I looked up,
and somehow there was Leon. Of course we were rejoiced to see him, it's
always so pleasant to meet friends abroad. After some talk, father went
out to take another look at the cathedral, and indulge in speculations
and legends, and left Leon and me in the window. It's as queer and
horrible an old town, girls, as you ever dreamed of, and, as there was
nothing external very fascinating, Leon soon turned his gaze inward,
and, after twanging several minor strings, began to harp on his endless
'inferiority of woman.' I plied him, you may know; I gave him Zenobias
and Didos and de Staels and de Medicis--in an emergency Pope Joan, and
finally the Boston Margaret Fuller. Leon only stroked his beard and
smiled.

''Miss Henrietta,' said he, at last, when I stopped in exultation, 'do
you grant the Africans the vigor or variety of intellect of the
Europeans?'

''No,' said I.

''Yet you concede that there may be instances among them, where
education and culture have developed great results.'

''Yes,' I thought, 'there might be.'

''Just as I, bewildered by Miss Henrietta's keen shafts and graceful
manoeuvres, yield that a woman is, once in a century, gifted with a
man's depth of thought and her sex's loveliness.' The comparison was
odious. What did I do? Oh, I (the swarthy Ethiop) only rose from my
faded arm chair, saluted Mr. Channing (the lordly European) as if I were
his partner in a quadrille, and brought out my cameos and mosaics to
show him. In about half an hour the beauty of his reasoning and
comparison reached his brain, but mine was impenetrable to his most
honeyed apolog