Every daughter of Eve dreams of an ideal,--of a man tender and true, who will fill her life with love's own melody; his word her law, his home her heaven, his honor her glory and his tomb her grave. And some day, from these castles in the clouds he comes--these day-dreams, golden as the dawn, become the halo of a mortal man, to whom her heart turns as the helianthus to the sun. At last the god of her idolatry doth walk the earth; but she must stand afar,--must not, by word or act, betray the holy passion that's consuming her, lest "that monster custom of habits devil," doth brand her bold and bad. Love ofttimes begets love, as the steel strikes fire from the cold flint, and a word from her might bring him to her feet; but she must stand with dumb lips and assumed indifference and see him drift out of her life, leaving it desolate as the Scythian desert, when it should have budded and blossomed like the great blush rose. So she drifts desolate into old maidenhood and the company of Maltese cats; else, when hope is dead in her heart--when the dream of her youth has become dust and ashes--she marries for money and tries to feed her famished heart with Parisian finery, to satisfy her soul with the Dead Sea fruit of fashion. No; I wouldn't give woman the ballot--not in a thousand years. I want no petticoats in politics--no she-senators or female presidents; but I'd do better by woman; I'd repeal that ridiculous social law--survival of female slavery--which compels her to wait to be wooed. I'd put a hundred leap-years in every century, give woman the right to do half the courting--to find a man to her liking and capture him if she could. Talk about reforms! Why, the bachelors would simply have to become Benedicts or take to the brush, and there'd be no old maids outside the dime museums. But I was speaking of Gall. . . . Gall is usually unadulterated impudence; but sometimes it is irremediably idiocy. When you find a man pluming himself on his ancestors you can safely set it down that he's got the disease in its latter form, and got it bad. I always feel sorry for a man who's got nothing to be proud of but a dead gran'daddy, for it appears to be a law of nature that there shall be but one great man to a tribe-- that the lightning of genius shall not twice strike the same family tree. I suppose that Cleveland and Jim Corbett, Luther and Mrs. Lease, Homer and J. S. Hogg had parents and gran'parents; but we don't hear much about 'em. And while the ancestors of the truly great are usually lost in the obscurity of the cornfield or cotton- patch, their children seldom succeed in setting the world on fire. Talent may be transmitted from father to son; but you can no more inherit genius than you can inherit a fall out of a balloon. It is the direct gift of that God who is no respecter of persons, and who sheds his glory on the cotter's child as freely as on those of monarchs and of millionaires.