medicines on me.  If he were a homeopath, I know I should; for if a billionth of a grain of sugar won’t begin to sweeten my tea or coffee, I don’t feel afraid that a billionth of a grain of anything would poison me,—­no, not if it were snake-venom; and if it were not disgusting, I would swallow a handful of his lachesis globules, to please my husband.  But if I ever become a doctor’s wife, my husband will not be one of that kind of practitioners, you may be sure of that, nor an “eclectic,” nor a “faith-cure man.”  On the whole, I don’t think I want to be married at all.  I don’t like the male animal very well (except such noble specimens as your husband).  They are all tyrants,—­almost all,—­so far as our sex is concerned, and I often think we could get on better without them.

However, the creatures are useful in the Society.  They send us papers, some of them well worth reading.  You have told me so often that you would like to know how the Society is getting on, and to read some of the papers sent to it if they happened to be interesting, that I have laid aside one or two manuscripts expressly for your perusal.  You will get them by and by.

I am delighted to know that you keep Paolo with you.  Arrowhead Village misses him dreadfully, I can tell you.  That is the reason people become so attached to these servants with Southern sunlight in their natures?  I suppose life is not long enough to cool their blood down to our Northern standard.  Then they are so child-like, whereas the native of these latitudes is never young after he is ten or twelve years old.  Mother says,—­you know mother’s old-fashioned notions, and how shrewd and sensible she is in spite of them,—­mother says that when she was a girl families used to import young men and young women from the country towns, who called themselves “helps,” not servants,—­no, that was Scriptural; “but they did n’t know everything down in Judee,” and it is not good American language.  She says that these people would live in the same household until they were married, and the women often remain in the same service until they died or were old and worn out, and then, what with the money they had saved and the care and assistance they got from their former employers, would pass a decent and comfortable old age, and be buried in the family lot.  Mother has made up her mind to the change, but grandmother is bitter about it.  She says there never was a country yet where the population was made up of “ladies” and “gentlemen,” and she does n’t believe there can be; nor that putting a spread eagle on a copper makes a gold dollar of it.  She is a pessimist after her own fashion.  She thinks all sentiment is dying out of our people.  No loyalty for the sovereign, the king-post of the political edifice, she says; no deep attachment between employer and employed; no reverence of the humbler members of a household for its heads; and to make sure of continued corruption and misery, what she calls “universal