To encourage one of my sex in the trying profession of book agent, I purchased, about this time, Dr. Lord’s “Beacon Lights of History,” and read the last volume devoted to women, Pagan and Christian, saints and sinners.  It is very amusing to see the author’s intellectual wriggling and twisting to show that no one can be good or happy without believing in the Christian religion.  In describing great women who are not Christians, he attributes all their follies and miseries to that fact.  In describing Pagan women, possessed of great virtues, he attributes all their virtues to Nature’s gifts, which enable them to rise superior to superstitions.  After dwelling on the dreary existence of those not of Christian faith, he forthwith pictures his St. Teresa going through twenty years of doubts and fears about the salvation of her soul.  The happiest people I have known have been those who gave themselves no concern about their own souls, but did their uttermost to mitigate the miseries of others.

In May, 1885, we left Johnstown and took possession of our house at Tenafly, New Jersey.  It seemed very pleasant, after wandering in the Old World and the New, to be in my own home once more, surrounded by the grand trees I so dearly loved; to see the gorgeous sunsets, the twinkling fireflies; to hear the whippoorwills call their familiar note, while the June bugs and the mosquitoes buzz outside the nets through which they cannot enter.  Many people complain of the mosquito in New Jersey, when he can so easily be shut out of the family circle by nets over all the doors and windows.  I had a long piazza, encased in netting, where paterfamilias, with his pipe, could muse and gaze at the stars unmolested.

June brought Miss Anthony and a box of fresh documents for another season of work on vol.  III. of our History.  We had a flying visit from Miss Eddy of Providence, daughter of Mrs. Eddy who gave fifty thousand dollars to the woman suffrage movement, and a granddaughter of Francis Jackson of Boston, who also left a generous bequest to our reform.  We found Miss Eddy a charming young woman with artistic tastes.  She showed us several pen sketches she had made of some of our reformers, that were admirable likenesses.

Mr. Stanton’s “Random Recollections” were published at this time and were well received.  A dinner was given him, on his eightieth birthday (June 27, 1885), by the Press Club of New York city, with speeches and toasts by his lifelong friends.  As no ladies were invited I can only judge from the reports in the daily papers, and what I could glean from the honored guest himself, that it was a very interesting occasion.