“Men and wimmen are made with divine impulses and desires, and human needs and weaknesses, needin’ the same heavenly light, and the same human aids and helps. The law should mete out to them the same rewards and punishments. “Serepta sez you call wimmen angels, and you don’t give ’em the rights of the lowest beasts that crawl on the earth. And Serepta told me to tell you that she didn’t ask the rights of a angel; she would be perfectly contented and proud, if you would give her the rights of a dog—the assured political rights of a yeller dog.’ She said yeller and I’m bound on doin’ her ’errent jest as she wanted it done, word for word. “A dog, Serepta sez, don’t have to be hung if it breaks the laws it is not allowed any hand in making; a dog don’t have to pay taxes on its bone to a Govermunt that withholds every right of citizenship from it; a dog hain’t called undogly if it is industrious and hunts quietly round for its bone to the best of its ability, and tries to git its share of the crumbs that falls from that table bills are laid on. “A dog hain’t preached to about its duty to keep home sweet and sacred, and then see that home turned into a place of danger and torment under laws that these very preachers have made legal and respectable. A dog don’t have to see its property taxed to advance laws it believes ruinous, and that breaks its own heart and the heart of other dear dogs. A dog don’t have to listen to soul-sickening speeches from them that deny it freedom and justice, about its bein’ a damask rose and a seraph, when it knows it hain’t; it knows, if it knows anything, that it is jest a plain dog. “You see Serepta has been embittered by the trials that politics, corrupt legislation have brought right onto her. She didn’t want nothin’ to do with ’em, but they come onto her onexpected and onbeknown, and she feels that she must do everything she can to alter matters. She wants to help make the laws that have such a overpowerin’ influence over her. She believes they can’t be much worse than they are now, and may be a little better.” “Ah,” interrupted the Senator, “if Serepta wishes to change political affairs, let her influence her children, her boys, and they will carry her benign and noble influence forward into the centuries.” “But the law took her boy, her little boy and girl, away from her. Through the influence of the Whiskey Ring, of which her husband wuz a shinin’ member, he got possession of her boy. And so the law has made it perfectly impossible for her to mould it indirectly through him, what Serepta duz she must do herself.” “Ah! my dear woman. A sad thing for Serepta; I trust _you_ have no grievance of this kind, I trust that your estimable husband is, as it were, estimable.” “Yes, Josiah Allen is a good man, as good as men can be. You know men or wimmen can’t be only jest about so good anyway. But he’s my choice, and he don’t drink a drop.”