As the wrongs of society can be more deeply impressed on a large class of readers in the form of fiction than by essays, sermons, or the facts of science, I hail with pleasure all such attempts by the young writers of our day. The slave has had his novelist and poet, the farmer his, the victims of ignorance and poverty theirs, but up to this time the refinements of cruelty suffered by intelligent, educated women, have never been painted in glowing colors, so that the living picture could be seen and understood. It is easy to rouse attention to the grosser forms of suffering and injustice, but the humiliations of spirit are not so easily described and appreciated. A class of earnest reformers have, for the last fifty years, in the press, the pulpit, and on the platform, with essays, speeches, and constitutional arguments before legislative assemblies, demanded the complete emancipation of women from the political, religious, and social bondage she now endures; but as yet few see clearly the need of larger freedom, and the many maintain a stolid indifference to the demand. I have long waited and watched for some woman to arise to do for her sex what Mrs. Stowe did for the black race in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," a book that did more to rouse the national conscience than all the glowing appeals and constitutional arguments that agitated our people during half a century. If, from an objective point of view, a writer could thus eloquently portray the sorrows of a subject race, how much more graphically should some woman describe the degradation of sex. In Helen Gardener's stories, I see the promise, in the near future, of such a work of fiction, that shall paint the awful facts of woman's position in living colors that all must see and feel. The civil and canon law, state and church alike, make the mothers of the race a helpless, ostracised class, pariahs of a corrupt civilization. In view of woman's multiplied wrongs, my heart oft echoes the Russian poet who said: "God has forgotten where he hid the key to woman's emancipation." Those who know the sad facts of woman's life, so carefully veiled from society at large, will not consider the pictures in this story overdrawn. The shallow and thoughtless may know nothing of their existence, while the helpless victims, not being able to trace the causes of their misery, are in no position to state their wrongs themselves. Nevertheless all the author describes in this sad story, and worse still, is realized in everyday life, and the dark shadows dim the sunshine in every household.