At ten minutes to three o'clock a line of women filed on the rostrum and took their chairs at the back of it. They were the representatives of the Co-Citizens' County Leagues. There were twenty-five of them, and they ranged in age and dignity all the way from Granny White, who was seventy, to the youngest bride from Apple Valley. Granny White looked like a crooked letter of the female alphabet in a peroda waist frock with a very full skirt, and a black silk sunbonnet upon her old palsied head, which wagged incessantly. The bride wore her wedding dress, which was now a trifle too tight for her. She looked like a pale young Madonna scarcely able to bear the weighty honour which had been thrust upon her. Some of the other women were enormously fat, some were pathetically lean, but they all faced the jeering crowd below with amazing assurance. They represented the harvest of all the virtues and sorrows and sacrifices of women for centuries, and all unconsciously they showed it with a calm accusing majesty. The audience, which was largely composed of men, stared at them and grew suddenly silent. They recognized their wives and mothers in those serene faces, and manhood forbids that you should hoot at your own blood-and-bone kin womenfolk. So they changed the subject. They began to talk, a perfect hurricane of inconsequential comments on every imaginable subject except the subject of women and their rights. Promptly at three o'clock Judge Regis came through a side door upon the rostrum, accompanied by Susan Walton and Selah Adams. The women took their places in two empty chairs among those at the back; the Judge approached the table in the middle of the rostrum, stood for a moment, a tall and elegant figure, looking out over the sea of faces below him. Then, lifting the gavel, he rapped for order. "Ladies and gentlemen," he began in slow, distinct tones, "I have the honour and privilege of opening the most remarkable meeting ever held in this county or state. We are about to make history, which is becoming to this memorial day of American Independence. I shall not address you upon the momentous issue at hand. Others far more capable will speak to you presently on that. I shall only state the purpose of the meeting. "We are assembled here to learn for the first time how the brave women who have done such valiant work for the cause of suffrage in this county have succeeded in their efforts beyond their most sanguine hopes----" "Hear! Hear! Ha! ha! Oh, haw-haw, haw!" The wall shook with the cannonade of masculine mirth. The Judge waited patiently. Then he rapped loudly for order, and in the lull he went on, not hurrying: "--and to reveal to you the plans by which this county will have the great distinction of being the first one in this or any other Southern state to give the ballot to our women, who have proved by nearly three hundred years of devotion and virtue and sacrifice for us and our children their worthiness for this trust.