were cold but respectful and, as a rule, she was treated decently by the county papers.  Occasionally a smart editor would get off the joke about her relationship to Mark Antony, which even then had become threadbare, and invariably the articles would begin, “While we do not agree with the theories which the lady advocates.”  Most of them, however, paid high tribute to her ability as a speaker and to the clearness, logic and force of her arguments.  A quotation from the Rondout Courier will illustrate: 

At the appointed hour a lady, unattended and unheralded, quietly glided in and ascended the platform.  She was as easy and self-possessed as a lady should always be when performing a plain duty, even under 600 curious eyes.  Her situation would have been trying to a non-self-reliant woman, for there was no volunteer co-operator.  The custodian of the hall, with his stereotyped stupidity, had dumped some tracts and papers on the platform.  The unfriended Miss Anthony gathered them up composedly, placed them on a table disposedly, put her decorous shawl on one chair and a very exemplary bonnet on another, sat a moment, smoothed her hair discreetly, and then deliberately walked to the table and addressed the audience.  She wore a becoming black silk dress, gracefully draped and made with a basque waist.  She appears to be somewhere about the confines of the fourth luster in age, of pleasing rather than pretty features, decidedly expressive countenance, rich brown hair very effectively and not at all elaborately arranged, neither too tall nor too short, too plump nor too thin—­in brief one of those juste milieu persons, the perfection of common sense physically exhibited.  Miss Anthony’s oratory is in keeping with all her belongings, her voice well modulated and musical, her enunciation distinct, her style earnest and impressive, her language pure and unexaggerated.

Judging from other friendly notices this must be an accurate description of Miss Anthony at the age of thirty-five.  The experiment of a woman on the platform was too new, however, and the doctrines she advocated too unpopular for it to be possible that she should receive fair treatment generally, and there were few papers which described her in as unprejudiced a manner as the one quoted.  A letter from her father during this trip said:  “Would it not be wise to preserve the many and amusing observations by the different papers, that years hence, in your more solitary moments, you and maybe your children can look over the views of both the friends and opponents of the cause?” This was the beginning of the scrap books carefully kept up for nearly half a century.

The journal for that year gives a detailed account of the hardships of this winter, one of the coldest and snowiest on record.  Many towns were off the railroad and could be reached only by sleigh.  After a long ride she would be put for the night into a room without a fire, and in the morning would have to break the ice in the pitcher to take that sponge bath from head to foot which she never omitted.  All that she hoped from a financial standpoint was to pay the expenses of the trip, and had she desired fame or honor, she would not have sought it in these remote villages.  The diary relates: