Every now and then we receive from America a word or a phrase which enriches the language without vulgarizing it--something, both more subtle and more comprehensive than our own equivalent, which we recognize at once as the better thing of the two. Thus 'otherwise-minded,' which some American writers use with such quaint force, is quite beyond our old 'contradictious' expressing the full meaning of contradictious and adding a great deal more. But if we have not hitherto had the word we have the thing, which is more to the purpose; and foremost among the powers which rule the world may be placed 'otherwise-mindedness' in its various phases of active opposition and passive immobility--the contradictiousness which must fight on all points and which will not assent to any. At home, otherwise-mindedness is an engine of tremendous power, ranking next to sulks and tears in the defensive armoury of women; while men for the most part use it in a more aggressive sense, and seldom content themselves with the passive quietude of mere inertness. An otherwise-minded person, if a man, is almost always a tyrant and a bully, with decided opinions as to his right of making all about him dance to his piping--his piping never giving one of their own measures. If a woman, she is probably a superior being subjected to domestic martyrdom while intended by nature for a higher intellectual life,--doomed to the drudgery of housekeeping while yearning for the æsthetic and panting after the ideal. She is generally dignified in her bearing and of a cold, unappeasable discontent. She neither scolds nor wrangles, though sometimes, no rule being without its exception, she is peevish and captious and degenerates into the commonplace of the _Naggleton_ type. But in the main she bounds herself to the expression of her otherwise-mindedness in a stately if dogged manner, and shows a serene disdain for her opponents, which is a trifle more offensive than her undisguised satisfaction with herself. Nothing can move her, nothing beat her off her holding; but then she offers no points of attack. She is what she is on principle; and what can you say to an opposition dictated by motives all out of reach of your own miserable little groundling ideas? Where you advocate expediency, she maintains abstract principles; if you are lenient to weaknesses, she is stern to sin; if you would legislate for human nature as it is, she will have nothing less than the standard of perfection; and when you speak of the absolutism of facts, she argues on the necessity of keeping the ideal intact, no matter whether any one was ever known to attain to it or not. But if she finds herself in different company from your own looser kind--say with Puritans of a strongly ascetic caste--then she veers round to the other side, on the ground of fairness; and for the benefit of fanatics propounds a slip-shod easygoing morality which shuffles beyond your own lines. This she