Woman's Rights. A WOMAN'S RIGHTS: What do those words convey? And strive in daily life their truth to teach. The right divine to weep when others weep; The right to wake and pray while others sleep. Right to be noble, right to be true, Right to think rightly—and rightly to do; To be the little children's truest friend, To be the ladies of creation's lords, As mothers, daughters, sisters, or as wives; The right in strength and honour to be free; A. L. By the Underground Railway. I was waiting for a train, to bear me to Kensington, at the Mansion House Station one evening about six o'clock last December, when I was aware of a familiar form that strode rapidly past me with eager, abstracted eyes, which saw nothing within reach. I always had a friendly feeling for Lester; we had been at Trinity together, but we lived so near one another in town that we seldom met except at the club or in a railway train, or at evening parties, when he would greet me with his usual enthusiasm, to which I responded with what heartiness I could express. Lester is a wildly unpractical person, always in a blaze of enthusiasm about some system of religion, or of cooperative house-building or organ-grinding, which is to regenerate the world and wipe out the family differences which have unhappily arisen in the brotherhood of man. He is such a good fellow one can't help being attached to him, even when most bored by the savings of the last Utopian scheme which has laid hold upon his imagination. He is too good for this world; if he were less so he would be a good deal more use in it. I watched Lester for a minute or two, tearing away from me, taking giant strides with his long legs. "In twenty-five seconds more or less," I said to myself, "he will reach the end of the platform, and be compelled to turn; then he will either see me at once and bore me to death with the last new craze (I see he's red-hot), or I shall get out of his way now and meet him at the other station. In that case he will probably accuse me of having avoided him, and be deeply hurt. No! Here he comes, he's bound to see me. Well, here goes." So I planted myself exactly in his way, and regarded him with what I hoped was a calm and repressive expression, intended to act as the first spurt from the watering-pot of cold common sense. He all but tumbled over me, but I stood like a rock and fielded him, and he recovered his balance physically though not mentally. "Jones!" he shouted. "Lester!" I replied firmly and unvociferously. "You're just the very person I wanted to meet," he went on with increasing force. "What luck, by Jove! Good! good! I am awfully glad to see you!" "I hope everyone else shares your sentiments," I replied with marked severity, for there he was shouting like a lunatic, and wringing my umbrella, black bag, and other articles which I held out in front of me as weapons of defence, under the impression, I suppose, that he was merely shaking hands in a friendly way. The station was full of people trooping home to dinner. Lester's gymnastics, his strange garments, and long hair flying out all round ever so far beyond his hat brim, attracted public attention. He suddenly released me, to my relief, and darted on. I turned, to see him similarly employed on a curate named Williams, whom I detested,—an aggressive prig with an obtrusively ritualistic coat, an inexplicable hat, and a correctly cadaverous complexion. How they achieve those blue and yellow tints finely shading into one another is one of the secrets of the craft! At this moment the train came up, and thinking to make good my escape-for a journey in Williams's company was more than I bargained for-I plunged at a carriage, but in a moment Lester was upon me, hurling in his curate on the top of me. The curate was panting and loth, but a child in the hands of his persecutor. For me he had a consistent chill dislike, but Lester almost drove him mad with his irresistible kindness and that tenacious friendliness which comprehended human beings so diverse and manifold, with all their backslidings and fatal errors of dogma. There was no help for it; Lester propelled us into the carriage, loudly expressing his joy and satisfaction at meeting us both. I failed to damp him by my sustained silence, and planted myself morosely by the window. He precipitated the curate, who was a weak miserable creature, into the opposite seat, and flung himself beside me. The train shrieked off and ploughed along in the darkness. Opposite me and beside Williams sat an unmistakable dissenting minister, unctuous, red-faced, and grimy, his pockets bulging with tracts. Beyond him there was a lady, rather young, clasping a red plush Prayer-book, on her way home from a saint's-day service at St. Paul's. She looked happy and satisfied, and had a nice quiet face. She was accompanied by her brother or cousin, a fair-haired youth with a complexion as unwholesome but not so successful as the curate's, a green coat, a tie the colour of a young spring carrot (it did not become him), half a jonquil in his button-hole, and pale nondescript eyes, which in vain strove after a poetical expression, and only succeeded in looking moonstruck. The lady addressed him as "Claud" from time to time; he was afterwards pointed out to me as the art critic of one of the illustrated papers. Besides these there was a suspicious-looking individual with dirty collar and cuffs, and a furtive eye, holding a canvas bag on his knee as carefully as if it had been a baby, and protecting it from unwary VOL. LXXVII. 2 к elbows and umbrellas. It was a season of explosions, and most people went about the underground railway prepared to be apprehensive. I kept my eye on that man. Lester began to rave about the Positivist service which he had just attended. The curate's remonstrances and interjections were all in vain, they were drowned in the torrent of his enthusiasm. My dear Williams, you don't know what you're talking about," he declared; "it's the finest thing in the world! It's awfully good! I never was more impressed in my life; it's just what we want, for it makes worship possible to those who had given it up as an impossibility. Here now there is a common religious ground on which we can all meet. What right have you to go setting your face against any form of elevating religious observance because of some difference about dogma and the Thirty-nine Articles? Are we not all seeking the same end? Are we not all worshipping the beauty of holiness? Do we not all strive to raise human life and make humanity more like a great ideal?" he demanded, shaking back his long hair and looking round with the fervent eyes of an evangelist. exceedingly wrong not to join hands in such a cause. reconcile such miserable narrow-minded fanaticism with the spirit of the Founder of the religion of humanity? I say you are How can you "Stop!" cried the curate, holding up his hand in agony (he had writhed all the while Lester was speaking). "You are terribly, horribly wrong! This is rank blasphemy, schism, and worse. You talk about differences of dogma as if they were nothing. What is there so important in the world as dogma? How can the Church recognise, or have any part with such presumptuous outlaws from her holy ordinances, except indeed to mourn over them, and pray that they may be brought to her from such deadly peril, even through cleansing fires." "Fire indeed will await them," broke in his stout neighbour, "fire everlasting where the worm dieth not." Perceiving at this point that he was getting somewhat involved, he groaned heavily, and continued, stretching out a fat red hand each to Williams and Lester, "Oh! my young friends, let me entreat you, while there is yet time, to turn and be saved. You, sir," turning to the curate, " are wandering as far from the true light as he, sunk, I fear, in the errors of popery, led away by the snares of Antichrist. Oh, my dear young friends, think, think what a terrible future you are laying up for yourselves," and he groaned again. I watched him from my corner with some interest. He was evidently in earnest, so much in earnest that the vulgarity of his manners and appearance was for the moment redeemed by a sort of dignity which struggled with the ludicrousness of the creature. But then he tore some tracts out of his pocket with strong titles and soul-stirring illustrations on the outside, and pressed them into the hands of his victims. Williams drew back shuddering, and looked at him as if he had been a garden slug or a splashing cabwheel. Poor Williams, he had such a little soul for great qualities to take up their abode in, they could only get into it in small fragments; yet he did his duty well on his own ground at St. Frides wide's. Lester took his tract politely, and eagerly flew at the Dissenter. Here was a grand opportunity for reconciling two traditional foes, he thought in that sanguine spirit which no experience of life will ever quell, and not only to reconcile them with one another, but also to unite them with the worshippers of humanity. All this and more, I have no doubt, Lester proposed to himself to accomplish during the twenty minutes, more or less, that now separated us from Kensington High Street, not to speak of the chances of the minister descending at some earlier station. They fell to work vehemently, as might have been expected (that is, my young friend and the Dissenter did), while the curate grew paler and paler with horror, and at first only made ineffective darts at one or other of his foes. The lady looked at them with troubled eyes from time to time; "Claud" shuddered, and covered his face with a saffron-coloured handkerchief. The dynamite conspirator clung to his bag, and recalled his roving eye to an expression of elaborate vacancy whenever I looked at him; I didn't like it at all. They were off on a future life now, at our end of the carriage, going at it hammer and tongs, the curate and all. Each was sketching his own particular promised land with sound and fury, and each reviling the other's speciality in that line. Lester was still persuasive in his eloquence, the others were at red and white heat respectively. I marvelled for the thousandth time, as I leaned back and pulled my hat over my eyes, at the extraordinary amount of strength and energy that human nature will expend over this unprofitable riddle, this endless question, which will be settled beyond all discussion if people would only have the manners to wait until their turn comes. What strange things reached me from the clamour of that fray! The Dissenter was all for white robes, crowns, gates of pearl, eternal flames, and some beast with seven heads and ten horns. "The stout gospeller," as Knox said, "roupit as he had been a raven." His voice generally drowned the curate's, who, however, could be heard from time to time quavering about something very like purgatory. Lester, loudly denouncing the limited and personal nature of both their views, was preaching some fine mysticisms incomprehensible to either of them, absorption of the individual into |