laboured over the literature of her own country. She was perhaps,
the only woman in New York who knew something of American
history. Certainly she could not have repeated the list of Presidents
in their order, but she knew that the Constitution divided the
goverument into Executive, Legislative, and Judiciary; she was
aware that the President, the Speaker, and the Chief Justice were
important personages, and instinctively she wondered whether they
might not solve her problem; whether they were the shade trees
which she saw in her dreams.

Here, then, was the explanation of her restlessness, discontent,
ambition,--call it what you will. It was the feeling of a passenger
on an ocean steamer whose mind will not give him rest until he
has been in the engine-room and talked with the engineer. She
wanted to see with her own eyes the action of primary forces; to
touch with her own hand the massive machinery of society; to
measure with her own mind the capacity of the motive power. She
was bent upon getting to the heart of the great American mystery
of democracy and government. She cared little where her pursuit
might lead her, for she put no extravagant value upon life, having
already, as she said, exhausted at least two lives, and being fairly
hardened to insensibility in the process. "To lose a husband and a
baby," said she, "and keep one's courage and reason, one must
become very hard or very soft. I am now pure steel. You may beat
my heart with a trip-hammer and it will beat the trip-hammer back
again."

Perhaps after exhausting the political world she might try again
elsewhere; she did not pretend to say where she might then go, or
what she should do; but at present she meant to see what