I am sure the reader never heard of her. As it makes a pretty story let me
tell it. Many years ago--don't ask me how many--there was a young woman,
Bertha von Hillern by name, a poor art student seeking money enough to take
her abroad, who engaged with the management of a hall in Louisville to walk
one hundred miles around a fixed track in twenty-four consecutive hours.
She did it. Her share of the gate money, I was told, amounted to three
thousand dollars.

I shall never forget the closing scenes of the wondrous test of courage and
endurance. She was a pretty, fair-haired thing, a trifle undersized, but
shapely and sinewy. The vast crowd that without much diminution, though
with intermittent changes, had watched her from start to finish, began to
grow tense with the approach to the end, and the last hour the enthusiasm
was overwhelming. Wave upon wave of cheering followed every footstep of the
plucky girl, rising to a storm of exultation as the final lap was reached.

More dead than alive, but game to the core, the little heroine was carried
off the field, a winner, every heart throbbing with human sympathy, every
eye wet with proud and happy tears. It is not possible adequately to
describe all that happened. One must have been there and seen it fully to
comprehend the glory of it.

Touching the recent Albany and Washington hikes and hikers let me say at
once that I cannot approve the cause of Votes for women as I had approved
the cause of Bertha von Hillern. Where she showed heroic, most of the
suffragettes appear to me grotesque. Where her aim was rational, their aim
has been visionary. To me the younger of them seem as children who need
to be spanked and kissed. There has been indeed about the whole Suffrage
business something pitiful and comic.