Yes, my pets, I am tired of talking to these workmen, who never answer a word; I will try you now--for a letter or two--but I beg your pardon for calling you pets,--my "qualified aspirants" I mean (Alas! time was when the qualified aspiration was on the bachelor's side). Here you have got all you want, I hope!--liberty enough, it seems--if only the courtyard were bigger; equality enough--no distinction made between young ladies of the highest, or the lowest, respectability; rights of women generally claimed, you perceive; and obtained without opposition from absurdly religious, moral, or chivalric persons. You have got no God, now, to bid you do anything you don't like; no husbands, to insist on having their own way--(and much of it they got, in the old times--didn't they?)--no pain nor peril of childbirth;--no bringing up of tiresome brats. Here is an entirely scientific occupation for you! Such a beautiful invention this of Mr. Wheatstone's! and I hope you all understand the relations of positive and negative electricity. Now you may "communicate intelligence" by telegraph. Those wretched girls that used to write love-letters, of which their foolish lovers would count the words, and sometimes be thankful for--less than twenty--how they would envy you if they knew. Only the worst is, that this beautiful invention of Mr. Wheatstone's for talking miles off, won't feed people in the long run, my dears, any more than the old invention of the tongue, for talking near, and you'll soon begin to think that was not so bad a one, after all. But you can't live by talking, though you talk in the scientificalest of manners, and to the other side of the world. All the telegraph wire over the earth and under the sea, will not do so much for you, my poor little qualified aspirants, as one strong needle with thimble and thread.