she wishes to give him a hint through me; I am wise, and shall hold my tongue.  Of the unmarried, one says she has received no wrong, but fears she may have inflicted some—­another, that as she is going to be married on Monday, she cannot conceive a wrong, and cannot possibly reply till after the honeymoon.  The third replies, that it is very wrong in me to ask her.  But stay a moment—­here is a quarrel going on—­two women and a man—­we may pick up something.  “Rat thee, Jahn,” says a stout jade, with her arm out and her fist almost in Jahn’s face, “I wish I were a man—­I’d gie it to thee!” She evidently thinks it a wrong that she was born a woman—­and upon my word, by that brawny arm, and those masculine features, there does appear to have been a mistake in it.  If you go to books—­I know your learning—­you will revert to your favourite classical authorities.  Helen of Troy calls herself by a sad name, “[Greek:  kuon hos eimi],” dog (feminine) as I am—­her wrongs must, therefore, go to no account.  I know but of one who really takes it in hand to catalogue them, and she is Medea.  “We women,” says she, “are the most wretched of living creatures.”  For first—­of women—­she must buy her husband, pay for him with all she has—­secondly, when she has bought him, she has bought a master, one to lord it over her very person—­thirdly, the danger of buying a bad one—­fourthly, that divorce is not creditable—­fifthly, that she ought to be a prophetess, and is not to know what sort of a man he is to whose house she is to go, where all is strange to her—­sixthly, that if she does not like her home, she must not leave it, nor look out for sympathising friends—­seventhly, that she must have the pains and troubles of bearing children—­eighthly, she gives up country, home, parents, friends, for one husband—­and perhaps a bad one.  So much for Medea and her list; had she lived in modern times it might have been longer; but she was of too bold a spirit to enter into minutiae.  Hers, too, are the wrongs of married life.  Nor on this point the wise son of Sophroniscus makes the man the sufferer.  “Neither,” he says, “can he who marries a wife tell if he shall have cause to rejoice thereat.”  He had most probably at that moment Xantippe in his eye.  You remember how pleasantly Addison, in the Spectator, tells the story of a colony of women, who, disgusted with their wrongs, had separated themselves from the men, and set up a government of their own.  That there was a fierce war between them and the men—­that there was a truce to bury the dead on either side—­that the prudent male general contrived that the truce should be prolonged; and during the truce both armies had friendly intercourse—­on some pretence or other the truce was still lengthened, till there was not one woman in a condition, or with an inclination, to take up her wrongs—­not one woman was any longer a fighting man—­they saw their errors—­they did not, as the fable says we all do, cast the burden of their own faults behind them, but bravely carried them before them—­made peace, and were righted.