gingerbread education, no more treatment as dolls and nincompoops, no more discrimination between one sex and the other as to knowledge of this world's wickedness, no more curtailment of personal liberty on the score of that bugaboo, propriety--all these, if you like, ladies; but we men, we fathers and philosophers, ask that you retain, for our sakes, beauty of face and form, beauty of raiment, low, modulated voices, and a graceful carriage, faith, hope, and charity, even though you continue to reveal these last-named as at present with sweet, illogical inconsequence. More than this, we cannot do without the tender devotion, the unselfish forethought, the aspiring faith, which, even though we seem to mock and to be blind, saves us from the world and from ourselves. If you are to become merely men in petticoats, what will become of us? We shall go down, down, down, like the leaden plummet cast into the depths of the sea. We shall be snuffed out and extinguished in sober truth. Hence, certain that the work of emancipation is to continue, my philosophical glance follows fondly and almost proudly the course of my second daughter, who is making a fool of herself at the moment by practising Christian Science, because she has beauty and grace and a knowledge of the value of colors, purity and tenderness and aspiring faith, as her mother had before her, while at the same time she has forsaken the beaten path of convention and turned her brow to the morning. All of which, Josephine informs me, is charming reasoning, provided Winona does not fall in love with somebody. I do not understand the precise logic of this criticism; but, on the other hand, Josephine is very apt to know what she is talking about. VIII I came home one afternoon with a puckered brow. "Has the Supreme Court decided another case against you?" asked Josephine, with solicitude. I shook my head, and answered wearily: "Worse than that." My wife regarded me in anxious silence, while manifestly she was cudgelling her brains to divine what could have happened. As she told me afterward, she imagined, from my doleful air, that I must at least have a seed in my little sac. "They have asked me to run for Congress in this district," I finally vouchsafed to state. Josephine dropped her fancy-work and sat upright with an air of satisfaction which was wholly out of keeping with my own dejected mien. "Really, Fred! Who has asked you? The Governor?" "The Governor does not usually go round on his bended knees asking candidates to run for Congress," I answered, with mild sarcasm. "Well, the Mayor then?"