"She reflected an instant, and then called around her the recipients of her gifts, told them the situation, and asked them to share their treasures with their unfortunate sister. Who could refuse a fairy, and above all the Blue Fairy? So, with the graciousness always conferred by happiness, these girls in turn approached the neglected Parisian and as they passed her one threw her a part of her black hair, another a tint of her rosy complexion; this one a beam of her joyousness, that one a touch of her sensibility; and thus it came about that the Parisian, so poor, so obscure, so eclipsed by her sisters, found herself in an instant, by this generous division, richer and more attractively endowed than any of her companions." Now this charming little parable is by courtesy true of the Parisienne; but it is far truer of the American woman, for of her it might have been written as a parable indeed. The product of no one blood, no isolated race, she has been given by the fusion of variant races in her ancestry an origin and a tradition, both physical and mental, such as has been granted to no other woman of whom history tells us. Into the ancestry of the English woman entered the elements of the Celtic blood, Brythonic and Goidal, of the Saxons and Teutons, of the later Normans and even Provençals, while through all, perhaps, ran the strain of the primitive Briton and Pict; but not even in this mingling of races can she compare with her American sister in diversity of racial source. Moreover, the English stock, which we unite in calling--incorrectly--the Anglo-Saxon, has remained permanent in type and fount; but this is not so with the American. This latter is in constant process of modification by the introduction of new progenital elements, and it cannot now be prophesied when there will be a clearly-defined race, with individual and permanent characteristics, established upon this side of the great seas. Therefore the American woman is the heir of the ages in a sense never before true of anyone. As with the Parisian in the story, so with the American woman in truth, all races have united in bringing her of their best gifts. It is for her to make of these the best that she may; certainly none of her sisters has ever begun her career with such fortune brought her by destiny as a birth-gift.