buffalo robe over all and tying the two tails together at the back of my head and thus effectually preventing me putting my hand to my nose, he said, “There, if you can only sit perfectly still, you will come out all right at Maquoketa; that is, if you get there, which I very much doubt.”  It was a long, hard drive against the wind and through drifts, but I scarcely moved a finger, and, as the clock struck eight, we drove into the town.  The hall was warm, and the church bell having announced my arrival, a large audience was assembled.  As I learned that all the roads in Northern Iowa were blocked, I made the entire circuit, from point to point, in a sleigh, traveling forty and fifty miles a day.

At the Sherman House, in Chicago, three weeks later, I met Mr. Bradlaugh and General Kilpatrick, who were advertised on the same route ahead of me.  “Well,” said I, “where have you gentlemen been?” “Waiting here for the roads to be opened.  We have lost three weeks’ engagements,” they replied.  As the General was lecturing on his experiences in Sherman’s march to the sea, I chaffed him on not being able, in an emergency, to march across the State of Iowa.  They were much astonished and somewhat ashamed, when I told them of my long, solitary drives over the prairies from day to day.  It was the testimony of all the bureaus that the women could endure more fatigue and were more conscientious than the men in filling their appointments.

The pleasant feature of these trips was the great educational work accomplished for the people through their listening to lectures on all the vital questions of the hour.  Wherever any of us chanced to be on Sunday, we preached in some church; and wherever I had a spare afternoon, I talked to women alone, on marriage, maternity, and the laws of life and health.  We made many most charming acquaintances, too, scattered all over our Western World, and saw how comfortable and happy sensible people could be, living in most straitened circumstances, with none of the luxuries of life.  If most housekeepers could get rid of one-half their clothes and furniture and put their bric-a-brac in the town museum, life would be simplified and they would begin to know what leisure means.  When I see so many of our American women struggling to be artists, who cannot make a good loaf of bread nor a palatable cup of coffee, I think of what Theodore Parker said when art was a craze in Boston.  “The fine arts do not interest me so much as the coarse arts which feed, clothe, house, and comfort a people.  I would rather be a great man like Franklin than a Michael Angelo—­nay, if I had a son, I should rather see him a mechanic, like the late George Stephenson, in England, than a great painter like Rubens, who only copied beauty.”