Before closing my friend’s biography I shall trace two golden threads in this closely woven life of incident.  One of the greatest services rendered by Miss Anthony to the suffrage cause was in casting a vote in the Presidential election of 1872, in order to test the rights of women under the Fourteenth Amendment.  For this offense the brave woman was arrested, on Thanksgiving Day, the national holiday handed down to us by Pilgrim Fathers escaped from England’s persecutions.  She asked for a writ of habeas corpus.  The writ being flatly refused, in January, 1873, her counsel gave bonds.  The daring defendant finding, when too late, that this not only kept her out of jail, but her case out of the Supreme Court of the United States, regretfully determined to fight on, and gain the uttermost by a decision in the United States Circuit Court.  Her trial was set down for the Rochester term in May.  Quickly she canvassed the whole county, laying before every probable juror the strength of her case.  When the time for the trial arrived, the District Attorney, fearing the result, if the decision were left to a jury drawn from Miss Anthony’s enlightened county, transferred the trial to the Ontario County term, in June, 1873.

It was now necessary to instruct the citizens of another county.  In this task Miss Anthony received valuable assistance from Matilda Joslyn Gage; and, to meet all this new expense, financial aid was generously given, unsolicited, by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Gerrit Smith, and other sympathizers.  But in vain was every effort; in vain the appeal of Miss Anthony to her jurors; in vain the moral influence of the leading representatives of the bar of Central New York filling the courtroom, for Judge Hunt, without precedent to sustain him, declaring it a case of law and not of fact, refused to give the case to the jury, reserving to himself final decision.  Was it not an historic scene which was enacted there in that little courthouse in Canandaigua?  All the inconsistencies were embodied in that Judge, punctilious in manner, scrupulous in attire, conscientious in trivialities, and obtuse on great principles, fitly described by Charles O’Conor—­“A very ladylike Judge.”  Behold him sitting there, balancing all the niceties of law and equity in his Old World scales, and at last saying, “The prisoner will stand up.”  Whereupon the accused arose.  “The sentence of the court is that you pay a fine of one hundred dollars and the costs of the prosecution.”  Then the unruly defendant answers:  “May it please your Honor, I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty,” and more to the same effect, all of which she has lived up to.  The “ladylike” Judge had gained some insight into the determination of the prisoner; so, not wishing to incarcerate her to all eternity, he added gently:  “Madam, the court will not order you committed until the fine is paid.”