It may excite wonder among my male readers that Alice should have told Lucy things that she knew the latter had seen with her own eyes. But this would be hardly putting the case fairly, as her remarks were couched rather in the form of exclamatory comments than of pure narrative. The male reader, again (would that there were no such dull animals in the world!), must be warned not to suppose that Alice and Mary were rude in talking simultaneously. It _is_ discourteous, oh, crass mortal, for one man to interrupt another; but where a party of girls are met together, it will be found that the words of each, though many, are no impediment, but a stimulus, rather, to those of the rest. Like swallows at eventide, circling around some village chimney, the more of them in the air at once, the more merrily do they flit. And it will be found, too, that no matter how many have been talking at once, each will have heard what all have said. It is when I contemplate this well-known phenomenon that my wonder daily grows that no allusion has ever been made to this acknowledged superiority of the female over the male homo, by what are called the woman-women, in their annual pow-wows in the interest of their sex. Cropped-haired woman after cropped-haired woman will arise, reinforced, here and there, by some mild-eyed male, o’er whose sloping shoulders soft ringlets cluster, and the burden of the plaint of she-he and he-she, alike, will be _only_ that woman is unjustly excluded by man from this employment or that privilege, for which she is as well fitted as he. They seem to me to forget that Hannibal was not overcome till Africa was invaded; and they will never advance their cause till they find some female Seipio to put man upon the defensive, and aggressively insist that the real question is not whether _she_ is capable of becoming lawyer, physician, preacher, but whether _he_ is, or, at any rate, will be, in the re-fashioned world which is coming, fit for any avocation whatever.