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They dug on until after sunset-long after | (moderately sane) would prefer a woman who they had lost all hope of finding John alive. His had been a sea captain ten or twelve years, to the body was at last found. It was placed upon the most ordinary of piano-playing and flower-paintlitter, and taken, under the soft evening sky, down through the beech wood home. Alice walked by its side, holding its hand in hers, speechless, and with dry eyes. She never knew until after her father's death, how her dear John | was murdered. She used to wonder why the old man shrank from her when she visited him, as she often did, in his confinement. The poor widow is living now, though she has suffered grief and want. Her daughter Jane has married a field laborer, and her sons, by whom she is now well supported, have never set foot in a pit since | they lost their father.

RIGHTS AND WRONGS OF WOMEN.

No

one denies the fact that women have wrongs; we wrangle only over the alphabet of amelioration. Some advocate her being unsexed as the best means of doing her justice; others propose her intellectual annihilation, and the further suppression of her individuality, on the homœopathic principle of giving as a cure the cause of the disease.

How few open the golden gates which lead to the middle Sacred Way, whose stillness offends the noisy, and whose retirement disgusts the restless; the middle path of a noble, unpretending, redeeming, domestic, usefulness: stretching out from Home, like the rays of a beautiful star, all over the world! Yet here have walked the holy women of all ages; a long line of saints and heroines; whose virtues have influenced countless generations, and who have done more for the advancement of humanity than all the Public Functionists together. Not that the comparison bespeaks much, or is worthy of the sacred Truth.

ing young ladies? Mindless as the one might be, the rough practicality of the other would be worse; and helpless as fashionable education makes young ladies, Heaven defend us from the virile energy of a race of Betsy Millars! Yet one philosopher has actually been found, who has had the moral courage to quote this lady's career as a proof that women are fitted by nature for offices which men have always assumed to themselves, and that it would be a wise, and healthful, and a natural state of society which should man brigs with boarding-school girls, and appoint emancipated females as their commanders. We wish Mr. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the heroic champion of Betsy Millar, no worse fate than to marry one of his favorite sea captainesses.

In the Utopia that is to come, women are to be voters, barristers, members of congress, and judges. They are to rush to the polling-booth, and mount the hustings, defiant of brickbats and careless of eggs and cabbages. They are to mingle with the passions and violences of men by way of asserting their equality, and to take part in their vices by way of gaining their rights. They are to be barristers, too, with real blue bags, pleading for murderers and sifting the evidence of divorce cases; offices, no doubt, highly conducive to their moral advancement and the maintenance of their purity, but such as we, being of the old-fashioned and eminently unenlightened school, would rather not see our wives or daughters engaged in. Of doctoresses we will say nothing. The care and the cure of the sick belong to women, as do all things gentle and loving. And though we can scarcely reconcile it with our present notions of the fitness of things, that a gentlewoman of refinement and delicacy should frequent dissecting-rooms among the crowd of young students, and cut up dead bodies and liv

A word with ye, O Public Functionists-ye damagers of a good cause by loading it with ridicule-ye assassins of truth by burying it beneath exaggeration! A woman such as yeing ones as her mother cut out baby-clothes, yet would make her teaching, preaching, voting, judging, commanding a man-of-war, and charging at the head of a battalion-would be simply an amorphous monster, not worth the little finger of the wife we would all secure if we could, the tacens et placens uxor, the gentle helpmeet of our burdens, the soother of our sorrows, and the enhancer of our joys! Imagine a follower of a certain Miss Betsy Millar, who for twelve years commanded the Scotch brig, Cloetus-imagine such an one at the head of one's table, with horny hands covered with fiery red scars and blackened with tar, her voice hoarse and cracked, her skin tanned and hardened, her language seasoned with nautical allusions and quarter-deck imagery, and her gait and step the rollicking roll of a bluff Jack-tar. She might be very estimable as a human being, honorable, brave, and generous, but she would not be a woman: she would not fulfill one condition of womanhood, and therefore she would be unfit and imperfect, unsuited to her place and unequal to her functions. What man

the care of the sick is so holy a duty, that if these terrible means are necessary, they are sanctified by the end, and God prosper those who undertake them! But they are not necessary. Women are better as medical assistants than as independent practitioners; their services are more valuable when obeying than when originating orders; and as nurses they do more good than as doctors. Besides, it would be rather an inconvenient profession at times. A handsome woman, under forty-or over it-would be a dangerous doctor for most men; and as specialities in medicine are quackeries, it would be humbug and affectation to shrink from any cases. For, admitting the principle that woman's mission-at least one of them—is to doctor, it must be extended in practice to all alike. And we may imagine various circumstances in which a young doctress would be somewhat embarrassing, if not embarrassed; yet what are we to do when all the doctors are driven out of the field, and we have no choice left us? And if women are to

be our doctors, will they be only old women, and ugly ones-will there never be bright eyes or dimpled cheeks among them? It might be very delightful to be cured by a beautiful young woman, instead of by a crabbed old man, yet for prudence sake we should recommend most wives and mothers to send for the crabbed old man when their sons and husbands are ill, and to be particularly cautious of feminine M. D.'s in general.

to them alone. Yes, by nature; in spite of the denial of the Public Functionists. Her flaccid muscles, tender skin, highly nervous organization, and aptitude for internal injury, decide the question of offices involving hard bodily labor; while the predominance of instinct over reason, and of feeling over intellect, as a rule, unfits her for judicial or legislative command. Her power is essentially a silent and unseen moral influence ; her functions are those of a wife and mother. The emancipatists rate these functions very lightly, compared with the duty and delight of hauling in main-top-sails or speechifying at an election. They seem to regard the maternal race as a race apart, a kind of necessary cattle, just to keep up the stock; and even of these natural drudges the most gifted souls may give up their children to the care of others, as queen-bees give their young to the workers. Yet no woman who does her duty' faithfully to her husband and children, will find her time unemployed, or her life incomplete. The education of her children alone would sufficiently employ any true-hearted woman; for education is not a matter of school-hours, but of that subtle influence of example which makes every moment a seed-time of future good or ill. And the woman who is too gifted, too intellectual, to find scope for her mind and heart in the education of her child, who pants for a more important work than the training of an immortal soul, who prefers quarter-decks and pulpits to a still home and a school-desk, is not a sea-captain, nor a preacher by mission-she is simply not a woman. She is a natural blunder, a mere unfinished sketch; fit neither for quarter-decks nor for home, able neither to command men nor to educate

One or two points of human nature the Public Functionists and emancipated women either sink or pervert. The instincts above all. The instinct of protection in man and the instinct of dependence in woman they decline to know any thing about; they see nothing sacred in the fact of maternity, no fulfillment of natural destiny in marriage, and they find no sanctifying power in the grace of self-sacrifice. These are in their eyes the causes of woman's degradation. To be equal with man, she must join in the strife with him, wrestle for the distinctions, and scramble for the good places. She must no longer stand in the shade apart, shedding the blessing of peace and and calmness on the combatants, when they return home heated and weary, but she must be out in the blazing sun, toiling and fighting too, and marking every victory by the grave-stone of some dear virtue, canonized since the world began. Homes deserted, children-the most solemn responsibility of all—given to a stranger's hand, modesty, unselfishness, patience, obedience, endurance, all that has made angels of humanity must be trampled under foot, while the Emancipated Woman walks proudly forward to the goal of the glittering honors of public life, her true honors lying crushed beneath her, un-children. noticed. This these noisy gentry think will ele

vate woman.

But the true Woman, for whose ambition a husband's love and her children's adoration are Women have grave legal and social wrongs, sufficient, who applies her military instincts to but will this absurd advocacy of exaggeration the discipline of her household, and whose legisremedy them? The laws which deny the indi- lative faculties exercise themselves in making viduality of a wife, under the shallow pretense laws for her nursery; whose intellect has field of a legal lie; which award different punish-enough for her in communion with her husband, ments for the same vice; the laws which class women with infants and idiots, and which recognize principles they neither extend nor act on; these are the real and substantial Wrongs of Women, which will not, however, be amended by making them commanders in the navy or judges on the bench. To fling them into the thick of the strife would be but to teach them the egotism and hardness, the grasping selfishness, and the vain-glory of men, which it has been their mission, since the world began, to repress, to elevate, to soften, and to purify. Give woman public functions, and you destroy the very springs of her influence. For her influence is, and must be, moral more than intellectual-intellectual only as filtering through the moral nature; and if you destroy the moral nature, if you weaken its virtues and sully its holiness, what of power or influence remains? She will gain place and lose power; she will gain honors and lose virtues, when she has pushed her father or her son to the wall, and usurped the seats consecrated by nature VOL. IX.-No. 49.-F

and whose heart asks no other honors than his love and admiration; a woman who does not think it a weakness to attend to her toilette, and who does not disdain to be beautiful; who believes in the virtue of glossy hair and well-fitting gowns, and who eschews rents and raveled edges, slipshod shoes, and audacious make-ups; a woman who speaks low and who does not speak much; who is patient and gentle, and intellectual and industrious; who loves more than she reasons, and yet does not love blindly; who never scolds, and rarely argues, but who rebukes with a caress, and adjusts with a smile: a woman who is the wife we all have dreamt of once in our lives, and who is the mother we still worship in the backward distance of the past: such a woman as this does more for human nature, and more for woman's cause, than all the sea-captains, judges, barristers, and members of parliament put together-God-given and God-blessed as she is! If such a wife as this has leisure which she wishes to employ actively, he will always find

occupation, and of a right kind too. There are the poor and the sick round her home; she will visit them, and nurse them, and teach their children, and lecture their drunken husbands; she will fulfill her duty better thus than by walking the hospitals, or preaching on Sundays! There are meetings to attend also, and school committees, and clothing-clubs, and ragged schools to organize; and her voice will sound more sweet and natural there than when shrieking through a speaking-trumpet or echoing in court. And there are books to read, and then to discuss by the tireside with her husband, when he comes home in the evening-though perhaps his attention may sometimes wander from the subject to her little foot, peeping out from under the flounces over the fender, or to the white hands stitching so busily and is not this better than a public lecture in a Bloomer costume? And then, perhaps, she can help her husband in his profession, write out a clear manuscript for his editor, or copy a deed, find out references and mark them for him, or perhaps correct his sermon, to the general advantage of his congregation-which, we contend, is a fitter occupation than arguing divorce cases in a wig and blue bag, or floundering in the quagmires of theology in bands and a scholar's hood. Our natural woman, too, loves her children, and looks after them; but the babies of our emancipated woman belong as much to the state as to her, and as much to chance as to either. Our natural woman plays with her children, and lets them pull down her thick hair into a curtain over her face, and ruffle even her clean gown with their tiny hands: but the emancipated woman holds baby-playing a degradation, and resigns it to servants and governesses.

and noiseless; his is in the broad daylight, and
his works are stormy and tumultuous; but the
one is the complement of the other, and while he
labors for her she watches for him, and energy
and love leave nothing incomplete in their lives.
Rest in the shade, dear woman!
Find your
happiness in love, in quiet, in home activity and
in natural duties; turn as from your ruin from
all those glaring images of honor which a weak
ambition places before you.

BELLADONNA.

THAT are you looking at so attentively, my

WHA

friend? Your eyes wander round the room ceaselessly. You inspect every thing, and you seem half pleased, half sorrowful. What is it that ails you! Ah! you are looking now at my wife. Yes! I quite agree with you, that she is very pretty. It is pleasant to see the lamp-light falling on those dark glossy bands of hair that sweep about her forehead. It is pleasant to see her small white fingers glide so nimbly all over that tiny cap which she is embroidering. The steam from the tea-urn rises in wreaths through the room. The sea-coal fire blazes brightly, and sheds a red and flickering light on the silver spoons and tea-service. You, my friend, sit on one side of the hearth, with your legs stretched out, and the cigar, which in consideration of our friendship my wife permits you to smoke, held between your thumb and forefinger. I, on the other side, with the last number of Bleak House in my hand, have just turned from that mournful death of Lady Dedlock to the happy picture set before me, and, as my eyes fall on that rounded and graceful figure seated near the table, working so quietly, and ever and anon casting a stray and loving glance hitherward, I thank God from my heart that she is not wandering off through the cold, bleak country, with the memory of guilt tracking her steps, while the husband lies at home faint and speechless with sorrow!

I was lucky, you say, to get her? Well! no matter; if you did not say it, you looked it, and I answer all the same-I agree with you, my friend. But I had my little difficulties, too. It is true that no terrible spectre of secret sin and undying sorrow loomed up between us, through which we could not pierce; but we went through many sad hours, and experienced many a biting wind before we turned that corner of our Life's journey where our present happiness lay waiting for us. Now I see by those widely-opened eyes and halfparted lips that you are eagerly wishing for the story of my love. If my wife permits it, you shall have it. May I, Belladonna?

Give us the loving, quiet wife, the good mother, the sweet, unselfish sister; give us women beautiful and womanly, and we will dispense with their twelve years' service on board a brig, or two or three years' close attendance in a dissecting-room. Give us gentlewomen, who believe in milliners, and know the art of needlework; who can sew on buttons and make baby-clothes; who, while they use their heads, do not leave their hands idle; who, while claiming to be intellectual beings, claim also to be natural and loving beings-nay, even obedient and self-sacrificing beings, two virtues of the Old World which our Utopians count as no virtues at all. Oh, Utopians! Leave nature's loveliest work alone! Let women have their rights, in Heaven's name, but do not thrust them into places which they can not fill, and give them functions they can not perform-except to their own disadvantage, and the darkening of the brightest side of this world. The dark eyes are lifted from the tiny cap, and Reflect (if ye ever do reflect) on the destiny of turn on me with a consenting glance; but in woman, which nature has graven on her soul and their brown depths I see stirring many very body; a wife, a mother, a help-meet and a friend; mournful memories, that rise higher and higher but not by mind or by person ever meant to be an as I tell the story of the past, until at last they inferior man, doing his work badly while neglect-overflow in tears. ing her own. The shadow of man darkens the path of woman, and while walking by his side, she yet walks not in the same light with him. Her home is in the shade, and her duties are still

A kiss, dear Belladonna, before I begin.

*

*

I have told you before, my friend, that Belladonna is an only child. You know, also, that she

is of Spanish blood, though educated in France. In France I met her. She was very young almost a child. I was, though a few years older than herself, in truth a boy. Love has, however, nothing to do with age. Walking along a road one day in the neighborhood of Dijon, I heard a clatter of hoofs behind me. I turned round and saw a young lady mounted on a donkey who would not go. The young lady seemed in a very evident passion. She had nothing in her hand but a delicate whip; but with this she belabored the donkey with tremendous good-will. The animal, however, took his punishment with the utmost indifference. He laid his long ears back on his neck and scarcely stirred, except now and then to give a very slight and playful kick with his hind legs, as if he were rather tickled with the whole affair. He even went so far as to crop some herbs from the road-side in the midst of what his rider intended to be a tremendous flogging. The young lady was quite pale, and her dark eyes sparkled with rage at this contumacious and insulting behavior on the part of the donkey. Once or twice she glanced toward me, and seemed to wish that the heavy cane which I carried in my hand was, for the time being, in hers. I could not resist such appeals long. Besides, I love a woman who can get into a good downright rage; so I stepped forward, without saying a word, and raising my cane let it fall with all my strength upon the donkey's buttocks. The application evidently took the animal by surprise. He could scarcely believe his nerves. Where could such a blow have come from? He knew the exact force of his mistress's whip, but this was a different thing altogether. For a moment he seemed lost in reverie; then, as I was lifting the stick, with the intention of administering a second and heavier dose, he suddenly shook his ears, gave a snort of apprehension, and set off at a round gallop; while his mistress, as she flew along, turned round in her saddle and gave me an exulting and at the same time grateful wave of the hand.

I was pretty often to be seen standing on the steps of the church. And the pretty little bow soon came to be an established thing; and when Belladonna came without her aunt, which she sometimes did, the bow was much prettier and warmer, and even occasionally a few pleasant little sentences escaped, neither of us well knew how, but we spoke to each other, and chatted a little; and I once made her a compliment. But when the aunt came along, Lord! how formal we were; and how little the bow became, and how very stiff I stood beneath the great stone effigy of St. Denis, with his head under his arm!

Things, of course, could not long remain so. Belladonna and I were in love with each other, and knew it; and formal salutations on church steps would not satisfy us, so we met in secret.

You must know, my friend, that at this time I was exceedingly poor. My father left a large family when he died, and I came in for a slender portion, which, however, if I had been prudent, I might have turned to account. But we young Americans were just then wild about travel, and the moment my money was lodged at the banker's for me I bade adieu to New York and trade, and set out on my European tour.

I spent all my money, and was too proud to ask my friends for more; so, at the time I speak of, I was literally cash-bound at Dijon. I was entirely destitute of means. My clothes were in that worst of all possible states of seedinessthey were unequal. I had a very nice pair of trowsers; but then the coat! Good Lord, that coat! It had been once a German student's coat, braided and frogged magnificently, and ornamented with a huge velvet collar. But now the seams were white, and the velvet collar looked as if all the snails in Eden had been walking over it and left their tracks there, while the braid and frogs clung only here and there, like the last vine leaves clinging to the garden-wall in winter. I owed a bill, too, at my lodgings. My landlady was poor but kind-hearted; and, knowing my position, she seldom troubled me. Many is the time, my dear friend, I have walked out as if to get my dinner, when I had not the price of a crust of bread in my pocket, and returned picking my teeth elaborately as I went up stairs, in order to induce my landlady to believe that I had been dining sumptuously. She found out the truth, however, at last, and, good soul that she was! used to call me to dine with her; but I did not go. I was too proud for that. I could have swept a crossing, mark you! but I could not tres

That was my first interview with Belladonna. The next time I met her was at chapel. She was going to confession, poor thing! and looked very sad and mournful. I was standing on the steps of the church (a favorite lounge with idle young men who wished to see pretty girls without much trouble) as she came up, attended by her aunt, a horrid old woman with a perpetual cold in the head. Poor Belladonna! you must have had a great many sins to confess that day, for your face was pale, and your lips pressed tight-pass on that poor old woman's scanty support. ly together, and you walked very reluctantly indeed!

As she ascended the steps her eyes met mine, and-no! she did not color-she grew paler than before if possible, and made me such a pretty little bow, that I would have walked to Spitzbergen to have got another. The aunt saw it, and by the whispering and nodding that took place between them as they passed, I could infer that poor Belladonna was getting a lecture.

You may be sure that, from that time forward,

Well! I only mention these details to show you that at the time I am speaking of I was very poor. My poverty did not annoy me as long as it interfered only with my own comfort. But when I came to meet Belladonna so often, and walk with her in the charming environs that surround Dijon, no one can imagine what anguish I suffered. Flowergirls used to accost us with bouquets, and I knew that Belladonna loved flowers passionately. But I was penniless. She would feel faint after her walk, and look longingly at the tea-gardens which

lined the road. I dare not enter, however, for I | fellow, that bad boots are the very acme of misery.

Mine were very bad. I had lost a heel off the
left one, and my great toe had made its appear-
ance through a hole in the top of the other,
which hole nothing would efface. I tried every
thing, from sewing a patch of black cloth under-
neath, to painting my stocking with black paint,
but all would not do. The hole grew larger and
larger every day, and the hour did not seem far
distant when my foot, grub-like, would triumph-
antly cast its shell, and emerge into the world un-
trammeled by any calf-skin fetters.

had no money to pay for the refreshments. Once
I had to pretend to be taken suddenly ill, when
she asked me to take her to see a panorama of
New York which was then exhibiting in some
building which we were passing. If ever the
temptation to become a thief was strong upon me,
it was then. I seriously revolved for several
nights the propriety of turning highway-robber.
At last I summoned up courage to tell her my cir-
cumstances. I disclosed all my poverty in fear
and trembling. How I was often dinnerless-
how my clothes were in pawn-how I expected "Dear Noble," said Belladonna to me, as we
a remittance—that remittance which poor men strolled one morning together down the street,
are always expecting-which, if I did not receive," your boots are shockingly bad. Why don't
I should have to seek some mendicity asylum;
all these things I told her, earnestly, truthfully,
nay, almost tearfully. How beautifully she heard
it! How beautifully she spoke to me! With
her little hand pushed trustingly into mine, and
her little arm thrown around my broad shoulders,
as if she, poor weak little woman, would, from
sheer strength of love, shelter me from all those
evils I spoke of, she cheered me up, and bade me
take good heart, and offered to share with me all
earthly ills. I wept with joy to find her so true
but did not accept her offer. I loved her too
well to thrust my pangs of misery upon her.

Did I not, Belladonna ?

you get another pair?" and she looked at me as
she spoke with such a charming forgetfulness of
my financial position, that it was impossible to
be angry with her.

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You forget, Belladonna, that in order to buy boots it is necessary to have money, and just at present-"

"Dear Noble, forgive me," and she pressed my hand. "Indeed, I never thought, or I would not-but there's my bootmaker," she cried, as if struck by a sudden thought; "why not go to him?"

"If you mean Pliquois, Belladonna, I must again recall a fact to your recollection, namely, that he makes only ladies' boots, and I don't think I could very well pass for a young damsel in a coat like this."

"

How I wish papa would give
me some money! But he never seems to think
I want any, and I am ashamed to ask him."
"Hush, child! And do you suppose that even
if you had money I would take it from you? No,
no! Noble Sydale has not reached that point yet.
There's the remittance which I expect every—”

I stopped suddenly. Poor Belladonna, in spite
of all her sympathy for me, could not prevent an
inward smile from twinkling through her eyes
at the mention of this eternal remittance, which
was always on the point of arriving.

Meanwhile I grew thin and pale, for I was starving; and my old German-student coat grew whiter and whiter at the seams, and my only pair of boots were in the last stage of dissolution. I "I never thought of that either," she answerknow no load that sits more heavily on a poor gen-ed, musingly. tleman's heart than bad boots. A shabby hat may pass with a thousand different excuses. Some one may have sat upon your new one the night before at the opera, and obliged you to make a shift with your second best; or it may have been blown off of your head crossing a bridge, and floated mockingly away on the rough waters of the river; or it may have been taken by mistake at a fashionable ball, and the indifferent tile you are now wearing left in its stead. All these theories may surround and fortify a shabby hat, but broken boots are inexcusable. No such accidents ever happen to boots. You can not be supposed to lose them. No man's boots were ever blown into a river, and sitting on them would not do them the slightest harm. A split across the uppers, or a loose sole are evident and inexcusable signs of poverty. If you have a hole in the side of one of them, every one in the street looks at it. It is of little use to ink your stocking, which shows through. I have tried that. The inked portion | of the stocking remains in its proper place for the first few minutes, and the boot looks well enough; but after a quarter of an hour's walking, it shifts its place somehow, and an agonizing patch of white displays itself. Then, when the soles are very thin, with what inward terror one walks over rough pavements. How certain one is to knock his toe violently against some projecting flag-stone, thereby increasing the incipient crack in the side, and, mayhap, utterly tearing the sole from the upper leather! Believe me, my dear

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"Well, laugh away, Belladonna; I don't blame you, though really I have no doubt-Well, I declare I'll never mention that remittance again! But there's my Uncle Jacob Starr, who is worth ever so many millions of dollars-do you know that a presentiment continually haunts me that he will leave me something handsome when he dies? I wrote to him about six months ago, and never got any answer. He is very old, and, Heaven knows, may be dead by this time. How delightful it would be if I grew suddenly rich, Belladonna !"

66

"Oh! wouldn't it! We'd go immediately to papa-no! we'd go first to a bootmaker's, and get you a pair of beautiful patent-leather boots with red tops."

་་

That would be splendor, Belladonna!"
"Yes! and then we'd go to the best tailor in
town, and get you a charming suit of—of—”
Blue and silver would look well with the red
tops, dear."

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