hard as the mortification, suspense, and defeat of this, and the long years of labor after all. See that sharp-faced woman, with darting, prying eyes. She rushes in one door and out of another. She hurries back. She meets a senator, and “button-holes him,” after the fashion of men, and begins conversing in the most importunate manner. He makes a retreat. Lo! in a moment she attacks another, leading him triumphantly to a sofa, where we witness a _teté-a-teté_, on the feminine side, carried on with marked emphasis and much gesticulation. This woman not only has one claim in Congress, she has many, and not one her own. She is a claim-agent, an office-brokeress. She buys claims, and speculates in them as so much stock. She takes claims on commission, deluding many a poor victim into the belief that “my influence” and “my friends,” Senator So-and-So and Secretary P. Policy, will insure it a triumphant passage and a remunerative end, “without _fail_.” It is not strange, through sheer pertinacity and by dint of endless worrying, she often succeeds. She is purely feline in her tactics—ever alert, watchful, wary, cunning, and so she worries her victims and wins. She is one of the world’s disappointed, dissatisfied ones; so, more than all else, we will be sorry for her. What God meant to be a fair life has been striven away in one weary struggle for the worldly honor and conventional _prestige_ lying just above her reach. And to her the most pleasurable excitement in all the claim profession is the delusion that it affords her of personal power and of association with the great! Pardon me, good friends, for calling a name. I _must_ call it, for it is true. Here comes a very dragon of a woman. I am as afraid of her as if she had horns. I was going to say that she was a man-woman, which is the greatest monstrosity of the genus feminine. But I honor my brethren too much for such a comparison, and so will simply say-in manners, she is a dragon. The men whom she seizes must think so; they give her her way, because they are afraid of her. Too well they know that, if they do not yield her point—if they do not at least promise her their influence—if they do not assure her that they will do all in their power to carry “_her measure_”—that she will attack them in the street, in the legislative lobbies, in the quiet of their lodgings, everywhere, anywhere, till they do. She is no covert power. She proclaims aloud that she has come to Washington to carry a measure through Congress to establish some man in power. And she does it because her tongue is a scourge and her presence a fear.