On my return to England I spent a day with Miss Emily Lord, at her kindergarten establishment.  She had just returned from Sweden, where she spent six weeks in the carpenter’s shop, studying the Swedish Sloejd system, in which children of twelve years old learn to use tools, making spoons, forks, and other implements.  Miss Lord showed us some of her work, quite creditable for her first attempts.  She said the children in the higher grades of her school enjoyed the carpenter work immensely and became very deft in the use of tools.

On November 1, 1887, we reached Basingstoke once more, and found all things in order.  My diary tells of several books I read during the winter and what the authors say of women; one the “Religio Medici,” by Sir Thomas Browne, M.D., in which the author discourses on many high themes, God, Creation, Heaven, Hell, and vouchsafes one sentence on woman.  Of her he says:  “I was never married but once and commend their resolution who never marry twice, not that I disallow of second, nor in all cases of polygamy, which, considering the unequal number of the sexes, may also be necessary.  The whole world was made for man, but the twelfth part of man for woman.  Man is the whole world—­the breath of God; woman the rib and crooked piece of man.  I speak not in prejudice nor am averse from that sweet sex, but naturally amorous of all that is beautiful.  I can look all day at a handsome picture, though it be but a horse.”

Turning to John Paul Friedrich Richter, I found in his chapter on woman many equally ridiculous statements mixed up with much fulsome admiration.  After reading some volumes of Richter, I took up Heinrich Heine, the German poet and writer.  He said:  “Oh, the women!  We must forgive them much, for they love much and many.  Their hate is, properly, only love turned inside out.  Sometimes they attribute some delinquency to us, because they think they can, in this way, gratify another man.  When they write they have always one eye on the paper and the other eye on some man.  This is true of all authoresses except the Countess Hahn Hahn, who has only one eye.”  John Ruskin’s biography he gives us a glimpse of his timidity in regard to the sex, when a young man.  He was very fond of the society of girls, but never knew how to approach them.  He said he “was perfectly happy in serving them, would gladly make a bridge of himself for them to walk over, a beam to fasten a swing to for them—­anything but to talk to them.”  Such are some of the choice specimens of masculine wit I collected during my winter’s reading!

At a reception given to me by Drs. Julia and Kate Mitchell, sisters practicing medicine in London, I met Stepniak, the Russian Nihilist, a man of grand presence and fine conversational powers.  He was about to go to America, apprehensive lest our Government should make an extradition treaty with Russia to return political offenders, as he knew that proposal had been made.  A few weeks later he did visit the United States, and had a hearing before a committee of the Senate.  He pointed out the character of the Nihilist movement, declaring Nihilists to be the real reformers, the true lovers of liberty, sacrificing themselves for the best interests of the people, and yet, as political prisoners, they are treated worse than the lowest class of criminals in the prisons and mines of Siberia.