Ah! you remember, you remember well, what a throb of pain, what a great tidal wave of grief swept over us all when Joan of Arc fell at Waterloo. [Much laughter.] Who does not sorrow for the loss of Sappho, the sweet singer of Israel? [Laughter.] Who among us does not miss the gentle ministrations, the softening influences, the humble piety of Lucretia Borgia? [Laughter.] Who can join in the heartless libel that says woman is extravagant in dress when he can look back and call to mind our simple and lowly mother Eve arrayed in her modification of the Highland costume. [Roars of laughter.] Sir, women have been soldiers, women have been painters, women have been poets.  As long as language lives the name of Cleopatra will live.

And, not because she conquered George III. [laughter]—­but because she wrote those divine lines: 

                    “Let dogs delight to bark and bite,
                    For God hath made them so.”

[More laughter.] The story of the world is adorned with the names of illustrious ones of our own sex—­some of them sons of St. Andrew, too —­Scott, Bruce, Burns, the warrior Wallace, Ben Nevis—­[laughter]—­the gifted Ben Lomond, and the great new Scotchman, Ben Disraeli. [Great laughter.] Out of the great plains of history tower whole mountain ranges of sublime women—­the Queen of Sheba, Josephine, Semiramis, Sairey Gamp; the list is endless—­[laughter]—­but I will not call the mighty roll, the names rise up in your own memories at the mere suggestion, luminous with the glory of deeds that cannot die, hallowed by the loving worship of the good and the true of all epochs and all climes. [Cheers.] Suffice it for our pride and our honor that we in our day have added to it such names as those of Grace Darling and Florence Nightingale. [Cheers.] Woman is all that she should be-gentle, patient, long suffering, trustful, unselfish, full of generous impulses.  It is her blessed mission to comfort the sorrowing, plead for the erring, encourage the faint of purpose, succor the distressed, uplift the fallen, befriend the friendless in a word, afford the healing of her sympathies and a home in her heart for all the bruised and persecuted children of misfortune that knock at its hospitable door. [Cheers.] And when I say, God bless her, there is none among us who has known the ennobling affection of a wife, or the steadfast devotion of a mother, but in his heart will say, Amen! [Loud and prolonged cheering.]

—­[Mr. Benjamin Disraeli, at that time Prime Minister of England, had just been elected Lord Rector of Glasgow University, and had made a speech which gave rise to a world of discussion.]

A GHOST STORY

I took a large room, far up Broadway, in a huge old building whose upper stories had been wholly unoccupied for years until I came.  The place had long been given up to dust and cobwebs, to solitude and silence.  I seemed groping among the tombs and invading the privacy of the dead, that first night I climbed up to my quarters.  For the first time in my life a superstitious dread came over me; and as I turned a dark angle of the stairway and an invisible cobweb swung its slazy woof in my face and clung there, I shuddered as one who had encountered a phantom.