A WOMAN FOR WOMEN. 
HE third week in October witnessed the passing 
away of Lucy Stone one of the most prominent 
and most beloved, as well as one of the earliest woman 
suffragists. Perhaps no better idea of her work and 
character can be given than that obtained by glean¬ 
ings from Alice Stone Blackwell’s extended story of 
her mother’s experiences. Lucy Stone was for more 
than 25 years editor-in-chief of the Woman’s Journal 
of Boston, through whose columns she has become 
widely known to the world of thinking men and 
women, and in these columns the daughter fittingly 
pays her tribute. 
Born of good New England stock, Lucy Stone seemed 
born to champion the cause of woman. The mother’s 
first words regarding her were: “ Oh, dear ! lam 
sorry it is a girl. A woman’s life is so hard !” The 
little girl early became indignant at the way she saw 
her mother and other women treated by their hus¬ 
bands and by the laws, and she made up her childish 
mind that those laws must be changed. 
Her father helped his son through college, but when 
his daughter wanted to go he said to his wife : “ Is 
the child crazy ?” The young girl had to earn the 
money herself. She picked berries and chestnuts, and 
sold them to buy books. For years she taught district 
schools, studying and teaching alternately. At the 
l'w wages received by women teachers, it took her 
until she was 25 to earn the money to carry her 
to Oberlin, then the only college in the country 
that admitted women. Crossing Lake Erie from Buf¬ 
falo to Cleveland, she could not afford a stateroom, 
but slept on deck on a pile of grain sacks, among 
horses and freight, with a few other women who, like 
herself, could only pay for a “deck passage.” At 
Oberlin she earned her way by teaching in the pre¬ 
paratory department of the college and by doing 
housework in the ladies’ boarding hall at three cents 
an hour. Most of the students were poor, and the 
college furnished them board at $1 a week. But she 
could not afford even this small sum, and during most 
of her course she cooked her food in her own room, 
boarding herself at a cost of less than 50 cents a week. 
She had only one new dress during her college course, 
a cheap print, and she did not go home once during 
the four years. 
Her first public speech was made during her col¬ 
lege course. The colored people got up a celebration 
of the anniversary of West Indian emancipation, and 
invited her to be one of the speakers. The president 
of the college and some of the professors were invited 
to speak. She gave her address among the rest and 
thought nothing of it. The next day she was sum¬ 
moned before the ladies’ board. They represented to 
her that it was unwomanly and unscriptural for her 
to speak in public. The president’s wife said : “Did 
you not feel yourself very much out of place up there 
on the platform among all those men ? Were you not 
embarrassed and frightened?” “Why no, Mrs. Mahan,’> 
she answered. “Those men were President Mahan 
and my professors, whom I meet every day in the 
classroom. I was not afraid of them at all!” 
Later in life, as an anti-slavery leader, she put up 
the posters for her own meetings, with a little pack¬ 
age of tacks and a stone picked up from the street. 
Sometimes the boys followed her, hooting and pre¬ 
paring to tear the posters down. Then she would 
stop and call the boys about her, and hold a prelim¬ 
inary meeting in the street, until she had won them 
all over and persuaded them to let her posters alone. 
Once in winter a pane of glass was removed from the 
window behind the speaker’s stand, a hose was put 
through and she was suddenly deluged with ice-cold 
water while she was speaking. She put on a shawl 
and continued her lecture. Pepper was burned, spit- 
balls were thrown, and all sorts of devices resorted to 
in order to break up the meetings, but generally with¬ 
out success. In most of the towns where she lectured 
no woman had ever spoken in public before. But in¬ 
stead of the strident ideal suffragist, here was heard a 
tiny woman, with quiet, unassuming manners, a win¬ 
ning presence and the sweetest voice ever possessed 
by a public speaker. This voice became celebrated. 
It was so musical and delicious that persons who had 
once heard her lecture, hearing her utter a few words 
years afterward on a railroad car or in a stage coach, 
where it was too dark too recognize the faces, would 
at once exclaim unhesitatingly: “That is Lucy Stone.” 
Helen Hunt was commissioned by a Boston paper, 
on whose staff she was at that time employed, to go 
to a meeting of the women and write up a derisive ac¬ 
count of the proceedings. Lucy Stone was the spe iker 
of the evening, and the reporter, instead of seeing the 
humorous side of the question and ridiculing, was so 
fascinated by the sweet voice and face of the speaker, 
that she listened with sympathy and came away a 
convert to the woman’s cause. 
The peculiarity of Lucy Stone’s married address has 
never been understood among women at large. She 
was not strong-minded enough to adhere to her re¬ 
solve never to marry. 
Mr. Henry B. Blackwell, a young hardware mer¬ 
chant of Cincinnati, who was fully in sympathy with 
her work, promised to devote himself to it if she would 
marry him, and she did so in 1855. But she regarded 
the loss of a wife’s name at marriage as a symbol of 
the loss of her individuality. Eminent lawyers, in' 
eluding Ellis Gray Loring and Samuel E. Sewall, told 
her that there was no law requiring a wife to take 
her husband’s name : it was only a custom. Accord¬ 
ingly she decided, with her husband’s full approval, 
to keep her own name, and she continued to be called 
by it during nearly 40 years of happy and affectionate 
married life. 
DINAH’S WAY. 
O, missis, I don’t gossip, leastwise I tries not to. 
’Taint alius easy (a-i^oin’ around as I do from 
house to house a-washin’ an’ a-cleanin’j to keep your 
tongue still. One sees an’ hears so much, you know, 
an’, natural like, you put things together : an’, laws, 
how much you could tell, and what mischief you 
could make if you wasn’t keerful. Laws, how keerful 
I have to be. Some, where I washes, are alius askin’ 
questions ’bout their neighbors; (real nice folks, too, 
they are; good to the poor an’ all that—goes to church 
reg’lar), but they’s somehow got the idea they must 
know everything ’bout other folks’s affairs, a-pryin’ 
an’ a-wonderin’ an’ a-pickin’, as it were, through you.” 
A silence fell between us. Dinah rubbed vigorously 
up and down the board, while I, at my dish-washing 
near by, did more than a little serious thinking, for 
her words, “ leastwise I tries not to,” seemed a plead¬ 
ing not to be “led into temptation.” Honest Dinah, 
we, your employers, may well take pattern by you; 
we who are wondering whether Mrs. A bought a new 
carpet for her sitting-room at the falltime cleaning, or 
put down again that much darned and mended one 
which we saw through the half-open parlor door while 
calling, and who end our wondering by “ We’ll just 
ask Dinah when she comes to wash ; she will know.” 
Shame on us ! Suppose she does know ; suppose she 
helped spread the much-worn carpet over the well- 
cleaned floor, consulting meanwhile with the tired 
mother as to the best way to lay it that the unceasing 
tread of the many little feet may be over the strongest 
part, and at the same time its mended rents show the 
least from that parlor door. “ I’ll mind my own busi¬ 
ness after this,” I said, mentally, and with a furious 
splash of my dishwater by way of emphasis. I might 
better, 1 added more slowly, say as Dinah says, “I’ll 
try to.” EMILY H. 8TEEDMAN. 
“SOME PUNKINS ” AND SOME OTHER THINGS. 
OT far from a barn one seed accidentally found a 
home, and soon, so congenial was the place, it 
started for the house, 50 feet away. It kept a straight 
line for the back steps, mounted these, six in number, 
and sitting down, as it were, on the landing, proceeded 
to grow a large “punkin.” The family were away 
through August and September. On opening the back 
door the morning after their return they beheld the 
procession of leaves reaching away down to the barn, 
and a big globe of yellow sweetness close to their toes 
that seemed to say, “Behold our welcome! Make 
pies!” They cut up that pumpkin, and there was 
enough dried to make pies all winter. So some things 
do better to be let alone now and then, and wax fat in 
silence and solitude. 
Bake Floors and Weak Lungs.— I ran into my 
neighbor’s the other morning and found her on her 
knees scrubbing her bed-room floor. “ Why don’t you 
put down a carpet,” said I, “ and then you would be 
saved this hard work ?” “ The very point,” she 
answered, “ where my‘lung cure’ comes in. As you 
know, I have a tendency to consumption. Three of 
my family have died of it, and I am sure it would have 
been death to me years ago if I had not lived up to my 
rules. One of the most important is the care of my 
bed-room, where I spend at least nine hours of the 24, 
and it is in sleep that one is most exposed to disease. 
Carpets are very cess-pools where the bacteria, 
microbes and all the other bad germs with new-fangled 
names are caught, and no amount of sweeping will 
entirely dislodge them. But here is my bare floor and 
once a week I go over it with a wet cloth and strong 
soap suds and drown out the horrid imps ready to get 
into my lungs and breed there. Another thing, I 
don’t have any more furniture in my bed-room than is 
positively necessary, and no pictures or bric-a-brac ” 
“ But it makes the room look like a barn,” said I. 
“ So it does, but health is better than looks, and I 
choose the health. Another thing, it makes me shud¬ 
der to go into my friends’ bed-rooms, the air is so 
impure. I find I take cold if my windows are closed, 
summer or winter. My weak lungs must have pure 
air, and when I can sit down, if the weather permits, 
it is on my back porch, and there I sit seven months 
of the year at least. I don’t believe drugs can pre¬ 
vent or cure consumption or taking cold. The remedy 
is right around our houses, but it is too cheap and 
handy for people to use.” 
Over Eighty. —Then there is Grandma Brown. I 
generally find her in the garden, often sitting on the 
ground by her rose-bed loosening the earth with a 
trowel. In spite of her age, she enjoys life, and is an 
enthusiast over her plants, talking about them instead 
of the pains and aches that so generally attend old 
age. “Tell me, Grandma,” said I, “the secret of 
your always being so well, in spite of living over 80 
years, as you have just told me.” “ It’s no secret,” 
said she. “ I have tried to live by three rules. Here 
they are : don’t fret; don’t take medicine ; don’t stay 
in the house all day. Of course, there have been trials, 
but the power that placed me here can be trusted to 
bring me out all right. I never had much money 
for medicines, but, fortunately, our well of water 
is of the best, and you would be astonished to 
know how many of my bodily ills have been cured by 
drinking water, hot or cold. As for the open air, it 
soothes and invigorates. I keep my rocking chair on 
the back porch, and all through the warm weather 
rest there instead of in a hot, stuffy chamber. My 
bed-room window is always open, summer and winter. 
People say to me: ‘You’ll have pneumonia, grandma !’ 
But I tell them that pure air at night is the best pre¬ 
ventive.” SISTER GRACIOUS. 
THUS DOES GRANDMOTHER. 
HE dear old grandma ! Some of us greatly delight 
in gazing at the lovely fancy work of nowadays 
and can refresh our very souls with its beauty. I won¬ 
der if we ever stop to remember that it is only the out¬ 
come of the love for the beautiful that has been handed 
down to us for generations, gaining strength and grace 
of expression, it may be; but only the legitimate re¬ 
sult of the great longing for “ pretty things” felt by 
our foremothers. 
And they used to try to express this desire for beauty 
in their humble lives by piecing bed quilts. To be sure, 
some of these creations were—I had almost said hid¬ 
eous—homely in the extreme. But I will leave it to 
any fair critic to say whether much of the so-called 
fancy work of our time is not equally devoid of taste 
and fitness and beauty. 
One of the “ grandmas ” who used to piece beautiful 
quilts has grown tired now, and she says the small 
pieces bother her head too much. Nowadays, when 
she wishes to piece, she gathers up the half-worn light 
print, and ehallie, and g'ngham dresses which the 
granddaughters have on hand. She says that the full 
skirts they wear now give such good material. The 
back breadths of their mothers’ dark ginghams, and 
German blue prints which do not fade, work in nicely. 
The ginghams are turned wrong side out and look 
quite fresh. The lower part of the men’s and boys’ 
every-day shirts, when made of pretty shirting, are 
also used. 
Grandma does not cut this work into very small 
p eces, but she combines them nicely, and makes both 
sides of the quilt of old materials. When pieced, she 
starches and irons the covers carefully. 
Life is now too full to permit the average woman 
time for bending over quilting frames for weeks at a 
time ; but grandma uses her work for comfortables 
which are quickly tied, and by the time they are worn 
out, they are soiled enough to need ripping apart. 
Any one might give this plan a trial, and it is a 
really pleasing way to use dresses too good for carpet 
rags and too light for every-day wear. 
MRS. LEVI H, NILES. 
A cream of tartar baking powder. 
Highest of all in leavening strength. 
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Report. 
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106 Wall Street, New York. 
