The month of June I spent in New York city, where I attended several of Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll’s receptions and saw the great orator and iconoclast at his own fireside, surrounded by his admirers, and heard his beautiful daughters sing, which gave all who listened great pleasure, as they have remarkably fine voices.  One has since married, and is now pouring out her richest melodies in the opera of lullaby in her own nursery.

In the fall of 1888, as Ohio was about to hold a Constitutional convention, at the request of the suffrage association I wrote an appeal to the women of the State to demand their right to vote for delegates to such convention.  Mrs. Southworth had five thousand copies of my appeal published and distributed at the exposition in Columbus.  If ten righteous men could save Sodom, all the brilliant women I met in Cleveland should have saved Ohio from masculine domination.

The winter of 1888-89 I was to spend with my daughter in Omaha.  I reached there in time to witness the celebration of the completion of the first bridge between that city and Council Bluffs.  There was a grand procession in which all the industries of both towns were represented, and which occupied six hours in passing.  We had a desirable position for reviewing the pageant, and very pleasant company to interpret the mottoes, symbols, and banners.  The bridge practically brings the towns together, as electric street cars now run from one to the other in ten minutes.  Here, for the first time, I saw the cable cars running up hill and down without any visible means of locomotion.

As the company ran an open car all winter, I took my daily ride of nine miles in it for fifteen cents.  My son Daniel, who escorted me, always sat inside the car, while I remained on an outside seat.  He was greatly amused with the remarks he heard about that “queer old lady that always rode outside in all kinds of wintry weather.”  One day someone remarked loud enough for all to hear:  “It is evident that woman does not know enough to come in when it rains.”  “Bless me!” said the conductor, who knew me, “that woman knows as much as the Queen of England; too much to come in here by a hot stove.”  How little we understand the comparative position of those whom we often criticise.  There I sat enjoying the bracing air, the pure fresh breezes, indifferent to the fate of an old cloak and hood that had crossed the Atlantic and been saturated with salt water many times, pitying the women inside breathing air laden with microbes that dozens of people had been throwing off from time to time, sacrificing themselves to their stylish bonnets, cloaks, and dresses, suffering with the heat of the red-hot stove; and yet they, in turn, pitying me.

My seventy-third birthday I spent with my son Gerrit Smith Stanton, on his farm near Portsmouth, Iowa.  As we had not met in several years, it took us a long time, in the network of life, to pick up all the stitches that had dropped since we parted.  I amused myself darning stockings and drawing plans for an addition to his house.  But in the spring my son and his wife came to the conclusion that they had had enough of the solitude of farm life and turned their faces eastward.