'The kind of women in the past who cared to be associated with this reform--they were women like Florence Nightingale, and Harriet Martineau, and Josephine Butler, and the two thousand other women of influence who memorialized Mr. Gladstone.' Something was called out that Vida could not hear, but that brought the painful scarlet into the young face. 'Shame! shame!' Some of the men were denouncing the interjection. After a little pause the girl found her voice. 'You make it difficult for me to tell you what I think you ought to know. I don't believe I could go on if I didn't see over there the Reformer's Tree. It makes me think of how much had to be borne before other changes could be brought about.' She reminded the people of what had been said and suffered on that very spot in the past, before the men standing before her had got the liberties they enjoyed to-day. 'They were _men_!' 'Yes, and so perhaps it wasn't so hard for them. I don't know, and I'm sure it was hard enough. When we women remember what _they suffered_--though you think meanly of us because we can't be soldiers, you may as well know we are ready to do whatever has to be done--we are ready to bear whatever has to be borne. There seem to be things harder to face than bullets, but it doesn't matter, they'll be faced.' The lady standing with her maid in the incongruous crowd, looked round once or twice with eyes that seemed to say, 'How much stranger life is than we are half the time aware, and how much stranger it bids fair to be!' The rude platform with the scarlet backing flaming in the face of the glorious summer afternoon, near the very spot upon which the great battles for Reform had been fought out in the past, and in place of England's sturdy freeman making his historic appeal for justice, and admission to the Commons--a girl pouring out this stream of vigorous English, upholding the cause her family had stood for. Her voice failed her a little towards the close, or rather it did not so much fail as betray to any sensitive listener the degree of strain she put upon it to make it carry above laughter and interjection. As she raised the note she bent over the crowd, leaning forward, with her neck outstretched, the cords in it swelling, and the heat of the sun bringing a flush and a moisture to her face, steadying her voice as the thought of the struggle to come, shook and clouded it, and calling on the people to judge of this matter without prejudice. It was a thing to live in the memory--the vision of that earnest child trying to fire the London louts with the great names of the past, and failing to see her bite her lip to keep back tears, and, bending over the rabble, find a choked voice to say--