recognize faces here to-night that I see
behind the windows of Fifth Avenue clubs of an afternoon, with their
noses pressed flat against the broad plate glass, and as woman trips
along the sidewalk, I have observed that these gentlemen appear to be
more assiduously engaged than ever was a government scientific
commission in taking observations upon the transit of Venus. [Laughter.]

Before those windows passes many a face fairer than that of the
Ludovician Juno or the Venus of Medici. There is the Saxon blonde with
the deep blue eye, whose glances return love for love, whose silken
tresses rest upon her shoulders like a wealth of golden fleece, each
thread of which looks like a ray of the morning sunbeam. There is the
Latin brunette with the deep, black, piercing eye, whose jetty lashes
rest like silken fringe upon the pearly texture of her dainty cheek,
looking like raven's wings spread out upon new-fallen snow.

And yet the club man is not happy. As the ages roll on woman has
materially elevated herself in the scale of being. Now she stops at
nothing. She soars. She demands the coeducation of the sexes. She thinks
nothing of delving into the most abstruse problems of the higher
branches of analytical science. She can cipher out the exact hour of the
night when her husband ought to be home, either according to the old or
the recently adopted method of calculating time. I never knew of but one
married man who gained any decided domestic advantage by this change in
our time. He was an _habitue_ of a club situated next door to his house.
His wife was always upbraiding him for coming home too late at night.
Fortunately, when they made this change of time, they placed one of
those meridians from which our time is calculated right between the club
and his house. [Laughter.] Every time he stepped across that imaginary
line it set him back a whole hour in time. He found that he could then
leave his club at one o'clock and get home to his wife at twelve; and
for the first time in twenty years peace reigned around that
hearthstone.

Woman now revels even in the more complicated problems of mathematical
astronomy. Give a woman ten minutes and she will describe a heliocentric
parallax of the heavens. Give her twenty minutes and she will find
astronomically the longitude of a place by means of lunar culminations.
Give that same woman an hour and a half, with the present fashions, and
she cannot find the pocket in her dress.

An