if we might sit down a minute, and he assented to that proposition. He continued, 'I won't be listed; I won't have my name put down on a list; the idea is preposterous! When I register an opinion I register it on the floor of the House!' At which point, I gently interrupted to assure him that that was exactly what we wanted; that his was the real spirit; that to have it discussed on the floor of the House was our object. 'What!' he roared, 'me talk about women voting? You'll never get that on the floor of the House in a million years!'

He wanted to make a wager then and there, but lobbyists do not make bets with Congressmen, so we lost that opportunity. We then led the conversation from suffrage to himself, and learned that he represented 'a happy farming community where women are content to mind their homes.' He said homes. He may have meant husbands. We left him feeling quite cheerful. A month later we saw him again and he was calm and almost civil.

Frequently, before the lobbyist's second visit, members talk their experience over with other Congressmen and acquire a different point of view. A friendly secretary told us that a Congressman in their corridor had lately asked his (the secretary's) employer, 'Did two ladies come to see you a little while back about voting?' His Congressman answered, 'Yes, and mighty nice ladies, too; they did n't take much of my time.' 'No,' the other one said, grimly, 'they did n't take much of my time either, but it will take a heap of my secretary's time to answer the letters I am getting from my state.'

where there was much suffrage literature, and continued, 'Now, I see what it has done and I am with you.'

We were greatly pleased by the effect of suffrage literature on the minds of public men, until we talked to another New Yorker farther down the corridor. In response to the customary query, he said plaintively, 'Oh, it's coming. Why the ladies in my state cut down Blank's plurality two thousand last election, and he never had his plurality pared before.' He was referring to the Tammany Representative with the shelf full of suffrage literature.

The physical exertion of lobbying was one day impressed upon our minds in an interesting manner. A friendly Representative from a Middle-Western state kindly volunteered to go around with us to the offices for a couple of hours. At the end of the first hour he was very droopy. At the end of the second hour he frankly confessed that he could do no more. 'You ladies surely have got good heads on you; but what I want to know is, how in thunder can your feet stand it?' We had been working for five hours before we met him.

That was the day we found the pedestal - that old-fashioned, uncomfortable piece of furniture on which a certain type of man is accustomed to place all women. We had previously thought that the pedestal was lost forever; but there it was, in the possession of an elderly gentleman with a face like a cameo and the manners of a Chesterfield. When we could politely leave, after listening to a long dissertation on the glories of his state, and the virtues of the homekeeping women thereof, our weary Congressman said dryly, 'I wonder if he uses any of that stuff on the scrubwomen who will be around here pretty soon?'

One young man, in response to our query as to his views on suffrage, rose

to his feet, and majestically waved his arm toward the corner of the room, where stood the usual enormous desk. "That,' he declaimed, 'is what I believe in!' I decided at last that he was referring to a large, framed photograph which stood on the desk. It was a likeness of a woman and child, and I ventured timidly that 'She looked like a good suffragist.' 'Suffragist!' he roared; she is a wife and a mother!'

In the corridor my companion said, 'What do we do when they are like that?' 'We come again,' I replied.

Another young man was argumentative along the old familiar homekeeping line. In my reply, I touched upon the handling of garbage as surely being within a woman's kingdom. He became at once quite excited, and said, 'I think ladies are much too fine to go smelling around garbage-cans!' We found later that his family name was intimately connected with a gar

bage-reduction scandal in his own state, and therefore my allusion had been most unfortunate.

We are so accustomed to the usual stock arguments against woman suffrage, that the replies come automatically; they are card-indexed in the brain, as it were. But occasionally we encounter an argument so overwhelming that it leaves us speechless.

One large statesman, in response to our query, said, 'I have a mother to whom I am most deeply attached, and for that reason I am unalterably opposed to woman suffrage!'

There seemed to be no adequate reply. Through these varied experiences the woman is beginning to lose a little of that awe with which she has been taught to regard a statesman, and the statesman is coming to understand that even a gentle, voteless female may possess potentialities for political embarrassment.

I

THEY had come upon it in the evening—a long, low house, too beautiful for words. Roses blew on its walls, the windows were leaded and oddly shaped, a stream ran through the garden. Mary had put her face to one window and John was peering through another. They shouted their discoveries, breathless, and like two children caught up by a game.

'A chimney-corner with inglenooks and iron dogs,' shouted Mary, 'and beams all over the ceiling.'

'Mine's got beams,' answered John, 'and paneling, and a carved fireplace

'Here's the best room,' shouted Mary, 'with a long window so that you can step out, and real old stenciled wall-paper; and some one 's carved his name on a brick "Nicolas, 1628.' She spelled it aloud for him and added the date.

"There's a ladder in the kitchen,' he repaid her; 'goes up into a bedroom, I suspect; and a pump, and a red brick floor, and great hooks to hang hams on I suppose it's hams.'

Thus they circled the house, proclaiming its glories, with no one to listen except the birds and the tinkling stream. It stood all silent, it made no answer, secure in its beauty, its age, and its stored memories. It seemed to them even a little ghostly as the shadows disappeared and they two were alone with it and the green, sheepdotted meadows.

gate, they took the path uphill, they reached a second gate, and so came to a lane that gave on the road and a vague village. Their fly was waiting for them at the inn.

'It's ours,' said Mary. She had said so once before.

'I'll buy it,' answered John.

Next day, however, they discovered that you could n't 'buy it' without taking over the rest of the estate, which ran to some six-thousand-odd acres and was not actually in the market. The agent smiled as he explained the situation. But Horner's was to let, he said.

He mentioned the rental. John and Mary agreed that it was ridiculous.

Horner's, they discovered, was what is known in England as an 'odd farmhouse.' Every farm had its dwellinghouse that went with the land, and if a farmer held more than a single farm, he would also hold a superfluity of houses. That was why Horner's was to let. Mr. Harrowby and his family preferred the other house - a modern one. That same afternoon John and Mary called on Mr. Harrowby.

He was expecting them, for John had been lavish with wires.

or

'Of course, if you keep a dog, it must n't worry my sheep in the lambing season,' he was saying. 'You understand that?'

They understood everything. They wanted now to see the inside of Horner's, and each had vowed to the other not to go into audible raptures for fear the man would put the rent up; and, for the same reason, they had agreed to conceal the fact that they were Americans.

Horner's, inside, was all and more than it had promised. Such dear rooms, no two alike! And none were square or rigid as in a modern house, and every hall and every lobby and every passage had its character. Mr. Harrowby bumped his head coming down the single flight of stairs; but then, he was very tall and had not looked out. They would look out.

There was no bath or bathroom, but one could be made; the water came here, boring under the meadow.

Mr. Harrowby apologized for countless drawbacks. He did n't think Horner's would suit them.

'Perhaps not,' they answered. It was the moment to knock a pound or two off that ridiculous rental; yet neither of them had the nerve, they confessed afterwards.

'If you were keeping chickens or took in boarders,' said Mr. Harrowby, 'there's an acre of land round the house and I could let you have part of the meadow.'

They were in the coach-house now, and looking over the three-stall stabling. John had thought out a place for the bathroom, and so had Mary. Luckily it was the same place.

'All right,' said John suddenly, ‘I'll take it. If it's a failure it's a failure, and not much harm done.'

Mr. Harrowby seemed relieved.

VOL. 115-NO, 2

'I don't mind papering the good rooms,' he said.

Mary could see his idea of papering; and he was n't going to touch that old stenciling of white and lavender!

'Of course, we choose,' she snapped. 'Certainly,' he assented guardedly, 'if it's not too expensive.'

So they settled it, and left him wondering. The agent would do the rest and John's bank was a reference.

Mr. Harrowby saw them to their fly; and next they were alone with plans that included furnishing, and heaps of pots and china and candlesticks - it would take them months and months. 'Not a word not a word did I say,' began Mary, 'about those old brass finger-plates-on every door they were - they want rubbing up.'

'And I cursed the heavenly closets that are going to save us buying wardrobes. Did you see the hooks and shelves in them?'

'And the dresser in the kitchenall oak, and lovely and neglected?'

'And the paneling and the carving in the room we're going to quarrel over?'

'And did you mark my English accent?'

'It was spotty,' answered John. 'It was,' she agreed. 'I kept on forgetting.'

And that is how John and Mary Callendar came to take Horner's.

II

John was an only son and did no work worth mentioning. His father, he would explain, had worked enough for both. It was true, literally and figuratively. There was no special reason why John should continue to waste a lifetime in a New York office, and so, Mary aiding and abetting, they had come abroad. This absence was their honeymoon, and already, when

they took Horner's, it had lasted several years. They had lived in Paris, in Greece, in Italy, and they had spent the bygone spring in London. The train from Dover had given them a glimpse of England. 'Let's settle here for a while,' John had said, looking out of the carriage window; and Mary had agreed. Old houses grew in that parklike country, and they had determined to fasten on one of these. Not a big one, that would own them, but a small, manageable place like Horner's. Its dozen rooms would be more than they wanted, and here, for a few years, they would make a home their very own and not some one else's, a real place into which they fitted. To-day, installed, they felt like one of those collectors whose choicest treasure was bought for half-a-crown. The house itself was their bargain, though at auction sales and on countless expeditions there had been others.

They said nothing to Mr. Harrowby, the unconscious victim, but privately they crowed over it. They grew into Horner's; little by little they took possession; and, as they had foreseen, its furnishing and arranging was the occupation of a year.

Yet no one else seemed to love it. Instead of a Rembrandt or a Velasquez, your ordinary man would sooner live with a Peter Smith. Old houses, too, they learned, are an acquired taste and one that comes only with a little knowledge. The tradespeople who called had a dubious air, a polite contemptuousness; and the two servants, a married bumpkin couple, lamented the inaccessibility of the house and its lack of those tawdry elements which they approved florid wall-papers, florid furniture, whitewashed ceilings. In England, outside the urban radii, the past and all its fine achievement had been forgotten, and the rustic mind longed for the obvious that sprawled,

all red-brick and window-glass, a sight for gapers looking through a painted railing.

John and Mary got a second married couple, this time from London. These loved the house.

And, incidentally, they had discovered that Horner's placed them. Socially, it should be understood. Their neighbors called, the vicar first, a shrewd, foreseeing man who declared them harmless and eligible, assessed their income at a glance, and the contributions that might be levied thereon without a strain. Next came the 'church-workers,' with subscription lists, desiccated women for whom love was not. The previous tenant of Horner's had always given five shillings, they said. And after these streamed some very minor gentry, blandly condescending. The vicar had reported and John and Mary were given their due place, no more, no less. They learned the order of that rustic hierarchy, where every one lived to the utmost limit of his income and a bit over. So might you know just who and what they were. The ladies of captains, majors, and colonels well retired, drove up to the front gate and left their cards; and one day came the pseudosquire and his lady, the ancient legendary squires being broken and dispersed. This fellow, the romantic son of a London bill-broker deceased, acted the part with a cheery realism.

And over all that landscape brooded the Estate, whose marquis owned everything and everybody—the village, the farms, the houses, big and little. The man was absent and an agent ruled for him. for him. His palace and his park you could see them from Horner'swere let to a financier whom no one knew, a kind of mammoth who occasionally escaped the London jungles: he brought his own friends, he lived his own life, he was invisible.