DEAR MRS. SPENCER: You want petitions. Well I have two which I got up some time ago, but did not send on because I thought the names too few to count much. The one is of _white_ women 130 in number. The other contains 110 names of black women. This last is a curiosity, and was gotten up under the following circumstances: Some ladies were dining with me and we each promised to get what names we could to petitions for woman suffrage. My servant who waited on table was a coal-black woman. She became interested and after the ladies went away asked me to explain the matter to her, which I did. She then said if I would give her a paper she could get a thousand names among the black women, that many of them felt that they were as much slaves to their husbands as ever they had been to their white masters. I gave her a petition, and said to her, "Tell the women this is to have a law passed that will not allow the men to _whip their wives_, and will put down drinking saloons." "Every black woman will go for that law!" She took the paper and procured these 110 signatures against the strong opposition of black men who in some cases threatened to whip their wives if they signed. At length the opposition was so great my servant had not courage to face it. She feared some bodily harm would be done her by the black men. You can see this is a genuine negro petition from the odd way the names are written, sometimes the capital letter in the middle of the name, sometimes at the end. Yours, ELIZABETH AVERY MERIWETHER. In response to 66,000 documents containing appeals to women, issued by the National Association, 250 petitions, signed by over 12,000, arrived in Washington in time for presentation to congress before the assembling of the convention, and were read on the floor of the Senate, with the leading names, January 14, 16, 20, 21, by forty-seven senators. In the House of Representatives this courtesy (reading petitions and names), requires unanimous consent, and one man, Hon. J. J. Davis of North Carolina, who had no petition from the women of his State, objected. Sixty-five representatives presented the petitions at the clerk's desk, under the rule, January 14, 15, 16. In answer to these appeals to both Houses, on Monday, January 19, Hon. T. W. Ferry, of Michigan, introduced in the Senate a joint resolution for a sixteenth amendment, which with all the petitions was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary. Tuesday, January 20, Hon. George B. Loring, of Massachusetts, introduced the same resolution in the House of Representatives, and it was referred, with all the petitions, to the Committee on the Judiciary. There were also during this congress presented over 300 petitions from law-abiding, tax-paying women, praying for the removal of their political disabilities.