'manhood'--sniggers to his friend behind his coffee as you come in: call
to mind pictures of certain brave 'tailed men' of old, at the winking of
whose eyelid your tiny club 'man' would have expired on the instant.
Threaten him with a Viking. Show him in a vision a band of blue-eyed
pirates, with their wild hair flying in the breeze, as they sternly
hasten across the Northern Sea. Summon Godiva's lord, 'his beard a yard
before him, and his hair a yard behind.' Call up the brave picture of
Rupert's love-locked Cavaliers, as their glittering column hurls like a
bolt of heaven to the charge, or Nelson's pig-tailed sailors in
Trafalgar's Bay. But, before you have gone half-way through your panorama,
that club-mannikin will have hastily departed, leaving his coffee
half-drunk, and you shall find him airing his manhood in the security of
the billiard-room.

Yes, for us who are denied the admiration of the billiard-marker; denied
the devotion of the barmaid (with charming paradox so-called); for us who
make poor braggarts, and often prefer to surrender rather than to elbow
for our rights; for us who deliver our opinions with mean-spirited
diffidence, and are men of quiet voices and ways: for us there is hope. It
may be that to love one's neighbour is also a part of manhood, to suffer
quietly for another as true a piece of bravery as to fell him for a
careless word; it may be that purity, constancy, and reverence are as
sure criteria of manhood as their opposites. It may be, I say; but be
certain that a strong beard, a harsh voice, and a bull-dog physiognomy are
surer still.

THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMAN

Have you ever remarked as a curious thing that, whereas every day we hear
women sighing because they have not been born men, you never hear a sigh
blowing in the other direction? I only know one man who had the courage to
say that he would not mind exchanging into the female infantry, and it may
have been affectation on his part. At any rate, he blushed deeply at the
avowal, and his friends look askance at him ever since. Of course, the
obvious answer of the self-satisfied male is that he is the lord of
creation, that his is the better part which shall not be taken from him.
Yet this does not prevent his telling his wife sometimes, when oppressed
with the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches, that 'it is
nice to be her. Nothing to worry her all day long. No responsibility.'
For in his primitive vision of