ue-hearted woman alive who would give up her birthright to
become--we will say Christopher Columbus himself.

It must be a fine thing, though, to be a man on some accounts;--to be
emancipated forever-and-a-day from the thraldom of skirts for
instance, and to push through a crowd to read the interjectional
headlines upon a bulletin board, instead of going meekly and
unenlightened home, to be told by John three hours later that "a
woman's curiosity passes masculine comprehension, and that he is too
tired and hungry to talk." It must be a satisfaction to be able to hit
another nail with a hammer than that attached to one's own thumb, and
to hurl a stone from the shoulder instead of tossing it from the
wrist; there must be sublimity in the thrill with which the stroke-oar
of the 'Varsity's crew bends to his work, and the ecstasy of the
successful crack pitcher of a baseball team passes the descriptive
power of a woman's tongue. Nevertheless, the greatest architectural
genius who ever astonished the world with a pyramid, a cathedral, or a
triumphal street-arch, could never create and keep a Home. The meanest
hut in the Jersey meadows, the doorway of which frames in the dusk of
evening the figure of a woman with a baby in her arms, silhouetted
upon the red background of fire and lamp kindled to welcome the
returning husband and father, harbors as guest a viewless but
"incomparable sweet" angel that never visits the superb club-house
where men go from spirit to spirit in the vain attempt to make home of
that which is no home.

"You write--do you?" snarled Napoleon I, insolently to the wittiest
woman of the Paris salons. "What, for instance, have been some of your
works since you have been in this country?"

"Three children, sire!" retorted the mother of Madame Emile de
Girardin.

It was this same ready witted mother whom another woman pronounced the
happiest of mortals.

"She does everything well--children, books and preserves."

Her range was wide. Comparatively few of her sex can grasp that
octave. Upon the simplest, as upon the wisest, Heaven has bestowed the
talent of home-making, precious and incommunicable.

Woman's Work in the Home! Taking up, without irreverence, the
magnificent hyperbole of the beloved disciple, I may truly say, "that
if they should be written, every one, I suppose the world itself would
not contain the books that would be written."

Let us touch one or two points very briefly. I have said t