machinery by which such excitements are worked up, and the impositions
to which credulous minds are necessarily subjected. As we had all been
through that period of depression and humiliation, and had been
oppressed at times with the feeling that all our professions were arrant
hypocrisy and that our last state was worse than our first, he helped us
to understand these workings of the human mind and reconciled us to the
more rational condition in which we now found ourselves. He never grew
weary of expounding principles to us and dissipating the fogs and mists
that gather over young minds educated in an atmosphere of superstition.

We had a constant source of amusement and vexation in the students in my
father's office. A succession of them was always coming fresh from
college and full of conceit. Aching to try their powers of debate on
graduates from the Troy Seminary, they politely questioned all our
theories and assertions. However, with my brother-in-law's training in
analysis and logic, we were a match for any of them. Nothing pleased me
better than a long argument with them on woman's equality, which I tried
to prove by a diligent study of the books they read and the games they
played. I confess that I did not study so much for a love of the truth
or my own development, in these days, as to make those young men
recognize my equality. I soon noticed that, after losing a few games of
chess, my opponent talked less of masculine superiority. Sister Madge
would occasionally rush to the defense with an emphatic "Fudge for these
laws, all made by men! I'll never obey one of them. And as to the
students with their impertinent talk of superiority, all they need is
such a shaking up as I gave the most disagreeable one yesterday. I
invited him to take a ride on horseback. He accepted promptly, and said
he would be most happy to go. Accordingly I told Peter to saddle the
toughest-mouthed, hardest-trotting carriage horse in the stable. Mounted
on my swift pony, I took a ten-mile canter as fast as I could go, with